Marmalade Daydreams

Summertime, and the living is easy.

2008-06-21T15:56:00.005-04:00

Amidst my commitments to my twin mistresses of Academia and Recreation, I've been miserably inattentive to this forum for my musings, stories, and photos. Apologies. Sad to say, a rival for the latent narcissism that I once semi-regularly funneled into a blog has been that breed of petty demon known as the "social-networking website." But thankfully, Facebook hasn't taken up enough of my time to substantially damage my relations with my two current loves: the spring semester ended strong, with too many nights spent beneath my towers of books accruing too-few hours of sleep on the office couch, dreaming of term papers. The ethanol-fueled engine of this writing machine, went into overdrive, and the controlled blaze of productivity soon grew into exuberant flames of celebration.

After finals, my sister came out for ten days and we both took a much-needed Hawaiian vacation. Having just returned from a business trip to Germany (you won't read about it in the Times for a few more years, but Lizzie's been quietly taking over New York's art world), she continued her westward course to Oahu, where I eased her transition to the Pacific with 3 "K"s: sake, poke, and karaoke. It was a night for the books, replete with feasting, drunken mayhem, and a heartwarming brother-sister duet of "Mama Look A Boo Boo." Much to my relief, Lizzie and my friends got along famously, and I'm still questioned as to when she's relocating to Honolulu. After some beach time, a bit of reggae festival, and more ono grinds ("yummy eats"), we went to Kauai for four days where, in spite of the vog, we hiked in Waimea Canyon, snorkeled on the north shore, and camped on the Na Pali coast -- it might have been physically impossible to have been more active or had a better time. We came back to "town" for a few days, bid farewell to my roommate Scott with a BBQ bash (when I accidentally bashed in my front screen door), and toured some of Honolulu's finer cultural attractions, including the amazing Bhutan exhibition at the Academy of Arts (coming to NY and SF soon!) and Liliha Bakery. Mmm... bakery...

Lizzie's last night here we camped at Waimanalo Beach, probably the most beautiful place I know, for a Memorial Day blowout. Since then, I've returned there every weekend (tonight will be the fifth consecutive Saturday) because, really, why wouldn't I want to spend as much time there as possible? Mountains surround the miles of soft white sands which, descending into shallow waters, makes the sea an unearthly vivid turquoise. Islands frame the seaside view and provide interesting foreground for moonrise (haven't been awake for sunrise yet). There's an intense shore break, but the waves don't get that big, so there's lots of quality playtime to be had, and the forest is full of deadwood for fires. It's all pretty ideal at our summer home, really.

During the week, all is well. I love my summer intensive Japanese class and, though to wake so early has been a little taxing, I'm also having fun taking an intro to Aikido. In a couple of weeks even these minimal time commitments will end, and I'll have some time to get thesis research done before I start a gig teaching English to students from Japan.

Well, I must be packing up for another summer home excursion. I must say that, as much as I miss New York and my peoples, there are some fantastic things about my new home (one year next month!). Our tree is fruiting again, the trade winds keep my house cool, and Waimanalo is a short drive away.

Happy solstice, wherever you are, and I hope the summer is treating you right!

2008-04-20T14:47:00.004-04:00

Why does everything seem to happen at once? -- someone should study that.

I realized yesterday that school is so attractive to me because it satisfies my immense curiosity. Answering questions is made somewhat easier with unlimited access to a university library, plus the fact that it's my job. Last week I'd been putting in overtime on a term paper -- spending nights at the office, writing for a solid six hours a day. I was hoping to finish it up by early this week, as I've got two other papers on top of two presentations and two Japanese finals but, after presenting my draft to the department on Friday, I've realized I'm going to have to discard the vast majority of the work I did this week. I guess it's something I'm going to need to get used to if I'm going to write a thesis.

The radio show has been going great -- the new slot, Friday mornings 6-9, has been much more conducive to receiving love from the listening audience, which helps break the stream of mental self-critique. Right after a particularly embarrassing gaffe that I was sure had alienated my listeners, a local guy called up to tell me that he loved the show -- the music, the voice, the mix. I asked, "But what about all the mistakes I've been making?" His reply? "No need worry, brother." And maybe he's right -- sometimes my critical nature overtakes my stoicism and I forget the wisdom of L. Cohen: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." No need worry.

I needed to remember that lesson Friday night when, between sets at on on-campus Earth Day fest, I had my first gig DJ'ing before a crowd of dancing peoples. It was tremendous fun but I got unduly perturbed when one of my sets was taken away. It was a textbook example of suffering caused by attachment, by defining one's identity in relation to an impermanent phenomenon. Undoubtedly part of my foul mood was sublimated frustration from the realization from my paper presentation that I misdirected my energies this past week, but not until my long walk home in the early hours of the A.M. did I let go of my anger of losing "my set". If you love it, set it free, no?

In celebration of letting go, I've been taking a break from the paper in observation of Pesach, the festival of liberation, and last night had what was certainly one of the most enjoyable seders of my twenty-eight years. I may miss my immediate family, but there's something to be said for a lack of embarrassing or awkward moments with extended relatives. We didn't have a Haggadah, but we had a couple of Jews and a couple of people who'd never been to a seder, so we actually had to explain each component of the ritual meal, and as there were only two of us who knew the blessings, we were able to cruise through the service and get to the food, which was phenomenal. So, there was no brisket or tzimmis, but between rack of lamb, salmon, phyllo-wrapped parmesan asparagus, and two delicious salads (one with feta, the other green papaya), we did pretty good.

I'm not quite ready to go back to work. Looking at the calendar and realizing how much needs to be done in the next two-and-a-half weeks is daunting. For today, I'm heading to Waikiki for a little Hawaiian vacation. Monday to Friday will be rough, but I need a little more furlough before heading back to the lines. Happy holiday, all y'all! Next year in Jerusalem...

2008-03-21T05:15:00.003-04:00

I'm ostensibly working on a freelance research project right now (to create a chapter on Hinduism for a social studies textbook), but I need a momentary break, so I just wanted to wish everybody a happy Purim. Unfortunately, as I'm hard at work, I'm unable to imbibe enough alcohol to follow the wisdom of the sages (to get so drunk that one can't distinguish the story's hero and villain so that one cheers and boos at all the wrong times), but the bourbon and water that I've been sipping on for the last few hours has definitely ameliorated the near-crisis situation that was my gastrointestinal system earlier this evening.

Partly on a dare, partly out of curiosity, around noon I took on a mighty task -- BC Burrito's "Gutbuster". No mere lunch item, the Gutbuster is approximately 180 cubic inches (I'd estimate 14 inches long with a 2 inch radius) of tasty filling wrapped in two overlapping 12" tortillas. All went well until I got to the rice-filled stub, which I had to finish to save face (and to get everyone else to chip in on the $14 monster). Let's just say that it was a little difficult to focus during the 2 1/2 hour seminar on Japanese Religions. I pretty much came straight home and took a 3-hour nap, but I woke up feeling a bit distended (as you might imagine). I was afraid to take an antacid (I'd rather break the food down than neutralize my digestive juices), and I feel I made the right call with some diluted Jim Beam. Who needs Tums when you've got corn liquor?

I'm going to take a walk to Safeway to grab a pineapple for an egg-dying Good Friday brunch I'm attending (I think it's safe to assume I'll be the only one dressed as Mordechai) ... once it stops raining. Until then, I guess it's time to get back to work. Glad it's spring break -- without classes, I hope to have time to get all of that stuff done that I usually put off (like this freelance project) before I fly halfway across the ocean to celebrate my grandpa's 80th with the family skiing at Alta. Tropical paradise to alpine paradise -- pretty sweet.

By the way, my radio show now streams online here Mondays 9 AM to noon, EST. Yes, that's the middle of the night here in Hawaii. I'm working on getting a less masochistic timeslot, okay? Jeez. I'm thinking of it as hazing. Anyway, tune in for the funky sounds of The Science of Soul...

The Synoptic Post

2008-02-18T01:11:00.004-05:00

It's been kind of busy since I've been back. Three seminars plus Japanese language plus the intro class that I T.A. would be a lot of work, but it wouldn't quite pay the bills. Working a few hours a week at an after-school program for middle school kids helps, as does some freelance editing and doing the yard work for the property where I live. It's all pretty enjoyable, and I find that sometimes I work more efficiently when I have less free time... Of course, I did forget to study for a couple of kanjiquizzes this week, but I'm still doing very well in my program.

The only new time commitment that I made this semester is I began spinning as a DJ on the college radio station. It's all very exciting because, aside from missing my show at Hamilton College, KTUH is a really good station with a pretty big listenership all over the island. For another six weeks or so, my show 'The Science of Soul' is on in the middle of the night (Wednesday morning, 3 6 AM), but that's a morning show for all of you East Coasters... The station's website isn't currently running its streaming audio, but I'll let you know once my show is going out over the Intranets.

Over the holiday weekend (Thank you George Washington Lincoln!), I've been dogsitting my friends' adorable mutt, Bean. If I had my camera, you could see her as she is right now, curled up asleep on the couch, tail in mouth. Absolutely adorable. As it is, here's a (possibly) cuter picture of her I found of her in a similar position. Awwww...

Hawaii's still beautiful. It's unacceptable how long it's been since I spent a day at the beach. Tomorrow I'm taking Bean hiking -- hopefully I'll be coming home with avocados and guavas! On a somewhat related note, does anyone know how to properly prune fruit trees? Please advise.

I wanted to get a lot done this weekend, but I've mostly been going out for long walks with Bean. That's productive, I guess -- for mental health, if nothing else. Went to a bit of an academic conference that was being held at the East-West Center yesterday where my friend was lecturing on a photographer in the New York art scene and met a cool anthropologist from University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies who did his M.A. in Japanese religion with one of the top guys in the field. That was pretty cool. I don't have a lot of food left over here (the lasagna they left me was incredibly delicious, but it's gone), so I need to go down to pick something up. When I get back, if I still have steam, I'll write some more stories. If not, I promise more soon.

Back In Da Tropics

2008-01-11T13:19:00.000-05:00

It was a wonderful couple of weeks of winter, and I felt blessed with snowfalls over Christmas and New Year's, but I'm glad to be back on Oahu where "chilly weather" means that you might goosebumps if you're in a T-shirt & shorts. Yesterday I went up to the North Shore with some friends to see one of the epic winter swells firsthand, and we were each moved to silence by the enormity of it all. We sat speechless in Waimea Bay watching this rare break create sets with thirty-foot faces dwarfing surfers until they appeared as insects, disappearing behind the set's second wave before dropping into these steep marine valleys of deepest blue, chased by the collapsing curl. We ate our lunch by Sharks Cove as crystal foam-capped mountains of surf impacted with the rock wall and shot skyward in a wall of geysers spraying fifty feet high before, seized by gravity, it fell crashing into its source like the cyclic construction and demolition of entire city blocks. Finally, we gawked at the Pipeline, arguably the world's most famous break and one of its deadliest, where a few hardy souls surfed within its enormous tubes, disappearing for a few dramatic sections before shooting out the barrel to the cheers of the sizable crowd. We ate freshly-cut pineapple on the scenic way home back, past the mysterious mountains valleys that serve as the settings for King Kong and "Lost", up above beautiful Kaneohe Bay, and through the tunnel blasted through the heart of the Ko'olau Range back to "town" -- the place I am lucky enough to call home for the next eighteen months.

Stories of my North American trip abound (just read a letter to the editor yesterday asking them to stop using the term "mainland" as it, by opposition, denigrates Hawai'i as "peripheral") and hopefully before the new semester begins on Monday I'll have an opportunity to write up a few of the more amusing and picturesque tales. Until then...

2007-12-18T16:57:00.000-05:00

At some point during my involuntary sequestration (i.e. writing final papers and grading final exams, which happily ended at 5 A.M. Saturday), much of Honolulu has caught Kalikimaka fever. No, Mom, no need to worry; though this is a tropical disease of sorts, it's no cause for alarm. As I'm sure you've figured out by the surrounding images, Mele Kalikimaka is the traditional Hawaiian Christmas greeting (hooray for invented traditions). On an exploratory foray down to the Ala Moana mall (former the world's largest) that ended in being adrift in a sea of teenage girls (more frightening than it sounds), I came across this giant barefoot Santa throwing the shaka (known on the mainland as the "hang loose" sign), and I knew I had to come back with my camera before hitting the road. Roadsideamerica.com had to hear of this one!

It wasn't until returning to this bizarre land of giant tropically themed Christmas decorations (interspersed with a nativity scene composed of strings of lights and the somewhat bizarre Jesus Bless America display pictured on the right) that I was told (by a guy working security) that inside the major building behind shaka Santa, there were more lights. Despite my recent discovery that I can upload videos to this blog, I do not feel the video of the interior of this building would be a suitable subject to portray here, dear readers. City Hall is filled with Christmas trees (and a rotating palm tree made from blue lights) sponsored by local government departments, local businesses, and mainland corporations. Christmas music blares. Groups of people, from multi-generational families to thug types with their skanky girlfriends, stumble through this simulated winter wonderland, photographing each other posing in the simulacrum of an illuminated pine forest in a government building in downtown Honolulu. A church group attempted to get me to attend Sunday services at their place of worship. Needless to say, the place bugged me out a bit.

[12/29 Postscript:] As I prepared to leave Hawaii for the first time since my arrival, I was worried about slipping immediately from tropical balminess to the arctic chill of a reportedly severe New York December, but I was pleased that the few days I spent in San Francisco en route served as a brief autumn. I felt the chill of night air, scuffled through the dead leaves lining the ground of the deciduous forest, and even saw some reddened maples stubbornly retaining their foliage through the solstice. With some semi-humorous misadventures, to be chronicled shortly, I've been very happy so far to be back East. Skiing and meals with family, spending time with old friends -- just being "home" -- has been really nice. I'm excited for the New Year's that I'm going to be spending with dear friends whom I do not see often enough. I feel blessed in this season. By the way, that reggae festival on the North Shore was incredible. It stopped raining the night before, and the sun dried up all of the mud into the perfect dancing surface. It was sunshiney all day, and the spot itself was incredibly beautiful and vivid. I'll relate anecdotes when I get the pictures from a friend.

2007-12-07T20:08:00.000-05:00

After losing my voice at the greatest football game I've ever seen (check out the highlights -- unbelievable!) last Saturday, an unbelievable end to an undefeated season for the Warriors (somewhat marred by some excessive force against an exuberant fan who rushed the field one play too early), I've buckled down and been cranking out final papers like it's my job. I basically have to finish up a smaller assignment, take my Japanese final, and I've got one big paper until I'm done with my first semester at UH!

So I took the day off and made some chili for the department chili cook-off tomorrow night... It's funny, I worked really hard on this chili, using four types of hot peppers, a number of roasted ingredients (my homemade stout, dark chocolate, & some espresso), and it basically tastes like I threw a bunch of adobo-soaked chipotle peppers in there. Not that I'm complaining, it's a great taste, but I know for next time: just spend the $2.50 for a can of chipotle peppers. We'll see how it stacks up against the competition...

But, before the cookoff, I'm heading up to Kualoa Ranch, 4000 acres of beautiful land outside of Kaneohe, for a roots reggae fest featuring most of the state's best bands with Ziggy Marley headlining -- here's hoping the sky looks something like this picture, as it's been pouring rain every day this week (with gale-force winds Monday night) due to a weird system parked off what's typically the leeward side of the islands. Well, flash flood warnings notwithstanding, the good news is that Kaneohe is on the "windward" side of the island, away from the storm, so I'm glad meteorology is an inexact science, and here's hoping trade winds kick in before tomorrow morning!

Giving Thanks

2007-12-01T13:56:00.000-05:00

I'm preparing to descend into a work-filled weekend in a push to be done with the East Asian Buddhism seminar whose professor, a polyglot Korean monk (who has academic mastery of 9 or 10 languages, regardless of his ability to express himself grammatically in spoken English). The visiting Venerable Dr. Mun has made my first semester much easier by being completely unprepared for lecture, assigning minimal reading, and largely disregarding the assignments that he gave on the syllabus. But now it is the time of reckoning for my first semester: four papers, two presentations, two exams -- one oral and one written -- and I'll be on the other side, that blissful state beloved to educators and educatees: winter vacation. I get excited thinking about going back to Brooklyn, about Vermont with the family, New Years with old friends.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I return to the present, where many assignments are pressing (especially as tonight I'm going to my first college football game in ten years, the last game of UH's historic WAC-championship season. I hope it goes better than the last game I attended, Hamilton's 1997 season opener, where the D-III Continentals were mentioned as a note in Sports Illustrated after being shutout by Amherst's Lord Jeffs with a final score of something like 67-0.), I figured I'd take a minute to post about Thanksgiving, perhaps in bullet format:

- I'm thankful that my grandfather bought me a ticket to Arizona, so we could have that whole side of the family present for Thanksgiving.

- I'm thankful for the continued health and success of my my family, especially in light of a scare we had over the weekend.

- I'm thankful for my family's continual support and love (despite my grandfather busting my balls for being under poverty line -- on a similar note, any thoughts on the morality of my potential application for food stamps?).

- I'm thankful for all of the Chanukkah presents.

- I'm thankful that my aunt and uncle are active people so that every Thanksgiving we hike during the day, go for long walks under the desert stars after dinner, and go dancing at night (probably wouldn't get done without them).

- I'm thankful that the UH Warriors, with their definitive win Thanksgiving weekend over their biggest rival (the Boise State Broncos), seem destined for the Sugar Bowl (you have no idea how happy this makes people out here -- it's fun to be along for the ride).

- I'm thankful to the Universal Life Church for providing free ordinations (yes, you can now call me Reverend without irony), so that I can marry two of my closest friends next fall (I welcome any and all suggestions for the theme of the service -- so far the leaders are "Under the Sea" and the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre").

- I'm thankful to be out here, on a beautiful tropical island, with lots of new friends, undergoing research that interests me towards a degree that's challenging and stimulating (as opposed to my joke of a Masters in Education) at an institution with good faculty and resources. Hooray for Interlibrary Services!

- I'm thankful to Andrew of songstowearpantsto.com for thoroughly entertaining me this week with his hilarity. A one man They Might Be Giants who composes by request -- a talented musician who has hit on a goldmine of ridiculous ideas for funny songs.

- I'm thankful to be getting paid to hang out with kids again (as a "tutor" in an after-school program, where I'm even more of a babysitter than I was in Brooklyn). There's something about 12 and 13 year olds that makes me laugh whenever I'm not getting aggravated.

Alright, enough thanks-giving. It's December. Must get the rent check in the mail, stock up on some comestibles, and buckle down for the day. If I can write 8 more pages (already done the research) before the game, I'll be right pleased with myself.

Go Warriors!

Tired = "Crazy"?

2007-11-10T13:21:00.000-05:00

Recently, as I've returned to school, its open schedule, indiscriminate workload, and opportunities for socialization with a whole new peer group, I've returned to a life where sleep deprivation is a way of life. I tend to laugh off the cloudiness and substandard cognitive function of my weekdays as "a natural high," despite having read countless studies about the importance of regular amounts of sleep for physical and mental health. I don't usually do the "topical blog," but this last study I read really makes me reconsider living in sleep debt.

Consider this article outlining research published last month in Current Biology: subjects who'd pulled an "all-nighter" had 40-80% more activity in the brain's emotional centers when shown disturbing images than a control group. The researchers drew on other studies of the brain to theorize that this activity effectively shuts down the prefrontal cortex (i.e. logical reasoning) and activates the release of noradrenaline/norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that triggers "fight or flight" responses and affects mood disorders. These brain patterns are similar to those of clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Obviously future research is needed (for example, if a gradually accumulated sleep debt has the same effect), but the findings of this study have significance for our chronically sleep-deprived populace. I don't have any hard statistics, but I know that many people close to me suffer from what have been categorized as "mood disorders"; if getting more sleep every night will help the brain regulate itself, I feel that sleep therapy needs to be at the center of the mental health profession. Also, I would hope that establishing a connection between sleep deprivation and irrational behavior will help reform the shifts held by hospital staff and military personnel; individuals without adequate sleep may simply be unable to make the life and death decisions required by these professions.

I have trouble "sleeping in" myself, so it makes me wonder how much sleep I really need -- WebMd.com has an interesting self-test to determine whether you actually need eight hours. I might try it out this week -- if I can finish my work before 11.

[Postscript (11/18) -- if you have 15 minutes and are interested in reading more about sleep, "The Sleep-Industrial Complex" in today's International Herald-Tribune is a pretty interesting article (if you can get through all of the mattress talk with which the author begins). It suggests that in pre-industrial societies, most people sleep in two 4 hour shifts, waking up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. I know my folks can relate.]

Fall Colors

2007-11-03T16:05:00.000-04:00

I don't know why October's a bad month for writing blog entries -- it seems I had the same problem last year. Maybe it's when the initial excitement of the new semester has worn off so that work distracts from personal endeavors. For whatever reason, walking to the bus yesterday morning, I turned a corner and, through the polarized lenses of my sunglasses, the bougainvillea, a monolith in royal fuschia, broke my month-long hiatus from writing. I've been missing the autumn colors of the temporal zone, which is natural, yet strange given the riot of color I'm surrounded by. If azaleas are fiery, these bougainvilleas are the equivalent of gazing into an open kiln. The hibiscus and poinciana next to my stoop are brilliant with their reds, oranges, and yellows. I guess I can deal with missing two years of fall colors.

Tribalisms

2007-09-29T08:44:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, when it still looked like the Yankees had a good chance of stealing the division title from the Red Sox, I spent a Saturday morning in church, that is to say, drinking Guinness in a crowded sports bar. However, to the dismay of both myself and my Bostonian friends with whom I shared onion rings despite our formalized animosity, the setting we had chosen to spend our holy hours was dominated by another congregation altogether – approximately thirty Ohio State fans hooting, hollering, and singing fight songs (complete with bugle accompaniment – mind you, this is a crowded indoor bar) – and this drew us even closer together, as respectful devotees of civilized baseball in contrast to these vulgar college football fanatics.

Well, my devotion to New York (more specifically, the Bronx, where my father lived as a child) has waned a bit as the awesome –- a late-season Yankees surge coinciding with a Sox slump, inspiring old-timers to retell the ’78 “Boston Massacre” that culminated with Bucky Dent’s legendary home run over the Green Monster in a one-game playoff -– has subsided (wild-card, schmild-card), and as a deeper tribalism has exerted its annual calling – it’s time again for the Jewish High Holy Days.

I venture to say that Honolulu has a greater diversity of churches and temples than anywhere I’ve ever been on four continents. On my walk to the fish market, I pass the wafting smoke of a Chinese Buddhist temple, a Catholic organization in a nondescript office building, and a beautiful Japanese shrine constructed in 1906. Walk in the other direction from my house and within two blocks there is another Japanese Buddhist temple, a Portuguese Catholic church, and a Chinese cemetery; along the 1.5 mile stretch between my house and the Reform Jewish temple, you’ll find three more Japanese temples (and the Japanese are commonly categorized as unreligious!), a Unitarian church, a Mormon ward, a cemetery started by Protestant missionaries in the 1840s, and the Royal Mausoleum containing the mortal remains of the Hawaiian royalty, once revered as the last of the great ali’i that ruled with divine mana (vital power). Further up the road you’ll find yet more Japanese Buddhist temples, the state headquarters of Seventh-Day Adventists, and a Hare Krishna temple (whose vegetarian restaurant, I learn, is a popular place for Jews to lunch after Saturday morning services).

After spending Rosh Hashanah with a distant relative at Chabad, a Chasidic group whose breakneck renditions of the liturgy always leave me disoriented and spiritually unfulfilled, I decided to check out Temple Emanu-el, whose Reform services I assumed would be much closer to the ones at Larchmont Temple, whose absence gnaws at me whenever autumn finds me in distant lands. Since Emanu-el, set in the lush Nuuanu-Pali valley that connects Oahu's south shore and windward coast, is only about a mile from my house, I decided to walk. Much to my chagrin, as I set off at dusk on my journey into the valley, I discovered that the highway is not made for pedestrians. It began to rain. I was about ready to turn around, but I decided to stick out my thumb for five minutes. Perhaps an angel would slow and stop. He did, a Baptist minister with a Texan drawl, who administrates over a hundred churches throughout the Pacific and "always ready to help out our Jewish brothers and sisters." Hmm... an expansion of the tribe? I was troubled by being implicated in missionary work throughout Polynesia, iven its sordid history, but I appreciated the ride.

I was surprised that I was significantly overdressed -- not only was I one of the only congregants in a jacket, most were in short sleeves and sandals. I sat alone and followed the liturgy, somewhat comforted by the words and some familiar melodies, but a bit put off by the large choir, which always strikes me as distinctively Christian. Still feeling a bit out of place, I stayed for a while afterwards helping put away the prayer books for the evening and meeting some of the younger temple members. I was unsure about whether I'd attend the next day, but there I was the following afternoon, spending the last five hours of my fast following Chaim Stern's service in Gates of Repentance, its poetic reflections on human frailty, and its signature interpretations of Jewish responsibilities for social justice and Zionism. It was all very familiar, but I felt as though I were applying analytical reason to many of its claims for the first time. But as I grew weary of oscillating between flickers of the spirit and applications of analytic reason, the light grew dim, and I realized that soon we'd eat.

At this point, the temple performed a ritual I've never seen -- the lights were turned off, and as the world grew dark, we finished the service reading along by penlights. Looking around the crepuscular synagogue and the remaining congregants huddled around tiny lights, I had the sense of being in a medieval sanctuary, where we studied Torah in secret. This experience did wonders to transcend the everyday and instill a sense of being in the presence of the divine. This sensation increased even more as we were asked to congregate at the altar for the recitation of the blessings of Havdalah, a weekly Jewish ritual that is undoubtedly my favorite: saying farewell to the sacred time of the Sabbath with a haunting, ancient melody, sweet-smelling spices, and the extinguishing of a beautiful braided candle in a glass of wine. The sensory richness of this poignant service was enhanced by the fact that we stood arm-in-arm encircling the ritual objects in a hall lit only by the three wicks of the Havdalah candle. It was a vivid moment of comunitas, the feeling that alienation is dissolved through ritual group formation and the attainment of numinous unity with others. I count it among the most spiritual social experiences of my life.

Post-script: Though I believe "God was with us" at Emanu-el that evening, I never got integrated into the temple community out here. To make a generalization, I think that multiple membership is a characteristic of our post-industrial society; while I'll always be a Jew, I feel that the transition from being a "mainlander" to being a local is much more crucial right now. Due to the spatiotemporal location of my birth, my Jewish identity doesn't come into account in too many of my day-to-day social interactions; but being a "haole" in the sense of "outsider" (its original meaning, though now it's used generally for "white") affects the way I'm perceived here and thus my relations. While race and ethnicity are incredibly important out here, I've found that people draw tribal boundaries based more on how long you've lived in the islands than by ancestral background. Despite racial prejudice out here against both blacks and whites, I've heard a lot of locals talk about Barack Obama as "a local boy." The fact that he graduated from Punahou (Honolulu's equivalent of Stuyvesant H.S. in New York), is often cited as proof of his presidential qualifications, much the way Clinton's Rhodes scholarship was mentioned back in '92 (regardless of the . Despite a good deal of ethnic pride (I've never met so many people so eager to list their variety of ancestors or so bold about inquiring about yours), the provincialism here is intense. Last night, a buddy of mine whose family is Hawaiian but grew up in Texas expressed ambivalence about who he'd root for if the Warriors and the Longhorns had to play each other in a bowl game, and not a single local expressed empathy. "But brah, your family's from here!" Regarding his reluctance to renounce membership of one tribe, yet his desire to be more accepted by the members of another, I know how he feels.

Happenings

2007-09-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

So, last year, on the fifth anniversary of the attack I wrote a sort of tribute to 9/11 -- today, half a world away, it's not on the forefront of my consciousness (I only had one conversation about it), so if you want something along those lines you can click here and read some of my thoughts on the subject. Interesting that I.S. 218 chose to hold Open House on September 11 again this year...

Also that Kanye (as in "Kanyeezee Fo'Sheezee") chose to release his "Graduation" today, which I've been bumping since, well, literally the break of dawn. I didn't do anything as far as homework yesterday -- directly after I gave an hour-long presentation on the sociology of religion for which I'd been preparing for two weeks, I went to my favorite local bar, had a couple of beers, came home, had something to eat, and went to bed. So what that I had a Japanese oral exam today? It's my only class & I figured that we wouldn't have much homework due on the day of the test, right? Wrong. I ended up having to spend an hour this morning doing the homework out of the workbook, so I didn't have time to take the bus (where I was planning on studying), let alone a shower. I had to hop on the bike, showing up for class in the nick of time, sweaty and stinky, the only available seat next to a cute female undergrad. To add to the fetid aroma, the used textbook I bought smells strongly of garbage even after I've left it outside for a couple of nights airing out. I'm fairly sure I didn't impress her.

But it's all good, cuz I had Kanye's new beats (far superior to those he produced for Common's new album) in my head, and I got to listen to the album in its entirety a couple of times during my office hours. Say what you will about his public persona, and I have a few things to say about his message on tracks like the Diamonds remix, I'm still a huge fan of his music, and I'm praying that "Graduation" outsells 50 Cent's album this week (in which case, 50 said he'd hang up the mic for good)...
I also posted some pics from my housewarming BBQ and a hike I took on Labor Day -- it wasn't the West Indian Day Carnival by any means, but it was nice to get out of the house, and it was pretty cool that the starting and ending trailheads were about a mile from campus and my house, respectively.

And, though I know everybody's sick of hearing about how much tropical fruit I've been eating (don't worry, this fruiting cycle is almost complete & you'll have a two or three month reprieve), it was real windy today, which made up for the fact that I brought a half-dozen of my largest, juiciest mangoes to the office to share with my department. Just look at my babies! I think I'm going to have to dice them up and freeze them for the long months between cycles... [Author's note: I did this and made better mango sorbet than those punks Haagen-Dazs.]

Oh, and may the spirit of Josef Zawinul rest in peace. His contributions to Weather Report, the electric Miles Davis albums, and his own projects (Zawinul Syndicate, Orient Express) are, in my opinion, probably the most sophisticated use of a synthesizer in jazz and fusion history. For those of you unfamiliar with this master musician, you'd probably recognize his compositions Birdland and "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" made famous by Cannonball Adderley (as well as The Buckinghams, but I'm not sure Joe liked their version), and I think everyone would enjoy this clip with Trilok Gurtu (an amazing Indian drummer), Joe with Weather Report ('78), and you fusion peoples would also like this clip of Zawinul Syndicate, apparently from Korean TV (Joe's the Austrian guy with the 'stache and the little hat). Anyway, today the world said goodbye to a master. We'll miss you, Joe.

Initiations

2007-09-02T16:27:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to the most amazing ceremony; a group of about ten magician-priests led a crowd of hundreds in chants for hours, while the congregants rocked their bodies in unison with the rhythms of the mantras. Some engaged in orgiastic convulsion, others kept one arm aloft for extended periods in some sort of extended practice; all joined in with the most famous of the mantras as best they could. Many of the chants referred to this sect's esoteric lineages, which allegedly extend back to famed Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in the mountains of ancient China. Certain chants were dedicated to the spirits of masters of their lineage who have moved on to the next world, and offerings of fermented malt beverage were spilled on the altar while reciting the names of the fallen...

Okay, so I went to see Wu-Tang, but since I've been initiated into the cult of social science, it was hard to not see a hip-hop show as a surrogate for church attendance for secular youth who nonetheless possess the human craving for mythology, devotion to living gods, and the transcendence of developing communitas through mass recitation and repetition of phrases. I'm trying to say that I had a good time.

So, school has been good, and I'd love to spin some more nonsense, but I'm already a couple of hours behind schedule for working on this big project that's my initiation rite to my religion seminar -- I need to create a guide to the field of the sociology of religion to accompany an hour-long presentation -- this requires me to actually read the literature. It's funny when one looks forward to three-day weekends as a good opportunity to get a lot of work done. Frightening. But if I make enough progress today, I get to go for a hike tomorrow. Motivation.

Thank you to everybody for so much birthday cheer -- I have to move to the middle of the Pacific Ocean more often -- so many cards, calls, emails! We had a spectacularly successful barbecue out here -- over 50 lbs. of grilled meats, 8 gallons of beer, and 5 gallons of sake were consumed in consecration of a new home, in celebration of reaching a new year of my life, and in rejoicing in the intoxication of good company on a beautiful summer afternoon. The actual night that began the 29th year of my life was spent belting out karaoke with a couple of friends whom I met not far from the Shaolin monastery and the Wudang mountains last summer, stumbling off in that gloaming preceding dawn, grinning madly at the ways in which life's surprises arise. Alright, enough nostagiazing -- sacralization awaits...

Chez Moi

2007-08-17T21:52:00.000-04:00

Well, I haven't moved in yet (depends when they're finished with a few last minute painting and cleaning details), but I just signed a lease on 1691A Kamamalu Ave, and to celebrate, I opened my first bottle of Paradise Pale Ale, the standard recipe packaged with the equipment kit, and it's fairly tasty. In retrospect, I should have picked up some more hops to dry-hop in the fermenter...

Anyway, I still haven't finished writing up all of my Kaua'i adventures, and a lot of other stuff has been going on with getting ready for school and all. I'll catch y'all up later on what's going down. For now, I'm psyched to be able to pick up some furniture and have a roof to throw it under, and though I love sleeping on Jesse & Kim's porch, it's nice to know that Monday morning, my first day as a full-time student since 2000, I'll wake up in my own house!

A Return To Primitive Time

2007-08-09T20:23:00.000-04:00

It's a grand thing to spend a week without knowing the time aside from the position of the sun, to live so that the phase of the moon has more reality than the day of the week. The last thing I did on the clock was to catch a plane at 8 AM on the morning of July 31. While waiting to board, I noticed some commotion by the gate, fellow turistas excitedly snapping photos through the glass. A full rainbow had manifested over the runway, one foot in the Waianae Mountains, the other in the harbor. I could only take this as an omen for a good trip.

I had barely closed my eyes on the puddle-jump of a flight before we began our descent -- literally, I don't think the fasten seatbelt sign had ever been turned off. As we pulled around the coastal mountains in which is nestled little Lihue, the county seat, I wondered what I was going to do when I got off the plane. I had been trying to find a campsite up in or around Waimea Canyon, Kauai's geologic centerpiece, the ever-growing product of millions of years of weathering and erosion's diligent partnership, weathering and erosion being an inimitable team of Erisian forces that shape our world in a time-frame that so dwarfs our teeny life cycles, we live under the illusion that the planet is static.

But back to the human time-frame of day-to-day, the lady in the seat next to me told me that it was an easy walk into town from the airport, so I strapped up my pack, walked out of baggage claim, and up the road to the State building, an architectural monstrosity of Euclidean geometry at the foot of lovely undulating mountainous ridges in jungle green. Leave it to civil government to construct the most hideous buildings imaginable. Inside, the lady at the Parks Department desk was unable to help me, as the campgrounds in the State Parks had all been reserved months in advance, and she referred me to the Fish & Wildlife Department, which maintained campgrounds used by hunters in the Canyon. This lady sold me a fantastic topographic map of the whole island and gave me a permit to camp in the lower Canyon, but told me that she had no idea why anyone would want to camp down there, as there's "nothing there".

This statement mystified me, and I walked out of the building a bit muddled, until I got two messages on my voicemail -- the one from a buddy telling me that he'd become a father the day before (congratulations Lucas!), the other from a lady at the YWCA telling me that they had vacancies at their campgrounds at the State Park. So it all works out... I loaded up on dry goods at the supermarket in town, and a few thumbed rides later, I was cruising up Waimea Canyon Road with a middle-aged ex-hippie couple from Colorado, we were stopping at all of the vista points, and what vistas they were! The misty canyon's red rocks and waterfalls certainly stood up to Mark Twain's moniker, "The Grand Canyon of the Pacific", though this canyon is full of feral chickens and pigs, wild guavas and blackberry brambles, all non-indigenous species threatening the highly endemic flora of the area. I set up my tent at the idyllic YWCA campground, Camp Sloggett in Koke'e State Park (what a pair of names!), and wandered up the road, hitting a few small trails in the afternoon heat, until I came to the end of the road, and could look down into one of the only valleys in the state that are only accessible by foot (or helicopter):

The Kalalau Valley of the Na Pali Coast
Pu'u o Kila Lookout, Koke'e State Park

How amazing! The sun was still high in the sky and, with next to no planning, I'd ended up exactly where I wanted to be. The rest of the week pretty much followed suit. The next three days I hiked my ass off, averaging twelve miles a day, all loop trails. The first day I went through the Alaka'i Swamp, an ecosystem unlike any other in the world -- an ancient caldera, the swamp captures much of the run-off from Mt. Wai'ale'ale, which averages more rainfall every year than any other place on Earth. The amount of water, the intensity of the tropical sun, and the elevation combine to create subspecies of Hawaiian flora that exist nowhere else. On the right is a variation on the ohi'a; usually a large Seussian tree with silvery twisted branches and these strange red tufts of flowers, in the swamp they grow as tiny shrubs; this wide variance is recognized in the plant's scientific name, Metrosideros polymorpha. If you want to see more pretty pictures of plants and stuff from this hike, the best ones made it on my Flickr page

Okay, I've been sitting in front of the computer all day. I need to get out and take a walk. I'll write more later. XOXOXOXO, me.

Vistas

2007-07-31T05:39:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I'm sleepy, and in about seven hours I need to leave for the airport, cuz in the morning I'm flying to Kauai, reportedly the most beautiful of these Hawaiian islands and I'm not packed or nothing, but I just wanted to say that I bought a bike; okay it's a girl's bike, so what? And that the place I live is real pretty, even if I'm not taking pictures all the time to prove it. Here's a couple. When I get back from Kauai, I'll probably have a bunch more gorgeous photos to make all y'all jealous, or possibly my camera will be rendered unusable by the rainiest spot on the globe. In preparation for my unorganized attempts to camp and hike through the island's pretty spots, I dumped my brewpot full of water on my tent, and it held up pretty well, I'm glad to say. Also glad to say that the fermenter is bubbling away, so in a couple of weeks we'll be drinking homebrew! All is well.

This is a flower on the bird of paradise bush that grows in my front yard.

This is the sun setting over the Waianae mountains as seen from said front yard.

Okay. Nighty night, lovely people. I'll write more next week sometime.

Pockets Full Of Mangoes

2007-07-26T00:50:00.000-04:00

Came home this morning to find this little guy licking up the remnants of whatever tasty beverage I had last night. Lizards like beer residue? Wonders never cease.

One of the most amazing things for me here has been to have a substantial number of my calories in the day come from produce that grows in my yard (I've been eating 3 mangoes a day) or in the neighborhood. In addition to the availability of locally caught fish, it's been providing me with an amazing sense of where I am. For example, I came home the other day with a breadfruit that I found on the street. Traditionally a large part of the Hawaiian diet, breadfruit is an odd looking thing, a lumpy green mass which exudes a white sticky sap (which can be used to caulk boats, strangely enough). Not to be content with just the one fruit, my gracious host drove us up the Likelike Highway (pronounced lee-kay lee-kay, although I prefer Likey-likey) into a nearby lush rainforest valley, where he knew of some more breadfruit trees by the side of the road. When I plucked the fruit off the tree (not an easy feat), it began to gush this white latex like a hemorraghing alien. I tell you, it's not easy to get this stuff off the cutting board. We sliced up the under-ripe breadfruit and made pretty decent fries out of it. The over-ripe one I put into a pudding concoction with my leftovers from my second, mildly toxic experiment in local ingredients.

While most greens are a bit pricier at the supermarket here than they are at home (actually, they're probably the same as the are at Whole Foods or Fairway, but they're not as good), taro leaves are very reasonably priced. I figured they would be similar to collard greens or kale. I found a Samoan recipe to make a little coconut/onion/lemon mixture, wrap it in the taro leaf, and steam it in little pockets. While washing these enormous leaves (also known as elephant ears) we wondered if they were edible raw. Ever the scientific experimenter, I tore off a small piece, chewed it up and swallowed. "It's okay", I said. "A little bitter." Moments later, a painful burning sensation roiled across my tongue, the insides of my cheeks and my throat. It was painful to swallow. A little research uncovered that the taro leaf deposits sharp calcium crystals to deter herbivore predation; cooking denatures the crystals so they are edible. Painful to humans, toxic to birds and reptiles (so in the long run, it's a good thing I didn't sign up to have that chameleon DNA inserted in my blastocyst, though I still think it would be awesome...). Oh, local flora: why do you mock me?

Still, last night cooked up a killer dinner based entirely on wares from the Chinatown market (like Asia, but cleaner) and our front yard (beloved mango tree), straight from the Zack Stein cookbook: Poached Salmon with Mango Salsa, served with Green Beans sauteed in olive oil, lemon & garlic. It came out fantastic; my host said it was the best meal he can remember eating on his porch. So keep that in mind when considering letting me sleep on your couch for weeks on end -- I'll buy groceries and cook for you!

I've been a bit lax about bringing my camera everywhere with me, but it's true. Although I live in a city, it's beautiful pretty much everywhere you go. Just to clarify, the first two pictures in the post below are views from near my house: the first is the view of downtown and the ocean from my street, the second is a view of the Pali valley (right outside my window) taken from the top of the Punchbowl crater that we are on the side of (formerly a depository for human sacrifices, it's now a military cemetery. The more things change...).

Here's a picture from (an unusually
flat portion of) my bike ride
between home and campus.

Movement

2007-07-21T12:55:00.001-04:00

Larchmont, NY -> West Warwick, RI -> West Dover, VT -> Carlisle, MA -> Bar Harbor, ME -> Albany, NY -> Larchmont, NY

1301 miles

Hike out from East Lake to Road’s End, Kings Canyon National Park

13.8 miles

Distance from Brooklyn, NY to Honolulu, HI

app. 4200 miles

Bike ride from my new home (!) to UH campus

3.3 miles

Like the thunderstorm, these past few weeks have harbored short periods of great beauty and excitement interspersed with longer periods of great anticipation, a certain electricity in the air heightening the wonder of us mortals regarding the intentions of the gods. I sit in the early morning on the slope of an ancient volcanic crater overlooking a rainy jungle valley beset with high-rise condos, completely awash in the overpowering perfume of ripening mangoes, which we've collected from the front lawn and heaped on the tiny counters of this little cottage.

Indeed, I am in my new home; rather, I am currently staying with the most gracious of hosts, a friend from my Hamilton daze, sleeping on his lanai (covered porch) until the end of the month when the cottage next door opens. These cottages (ohana), I was told, were traditionally built for the grandparents when the Hawaiian family grew too large for everyone to live in the main house. Due to the housing bubble and huge rent increases, it's increasingly common for families to rent out the ohana to low-income tenants (like grad students). So, if everything works out, in a couple of weeks, I'll have a nice two bedroom cottage next door to my friend with great views of the city and the mountains. Also, I can not fully explain how delicious are the mangoes from the tree out front -- clearly the sweetest and creamiest I've ever enjoyed -- and we just scoop them up from off the lawn. You could say that life is good.

But let me back it up a couple of weeks. As you might remember, my family took a trip to Acadia, the Northeast's only National Park, renowned for its granite cliffs dropping into foggy bays, its islands covered in spruce forests, their trees' dark branches draped in old man's beard. The geology of the area is stunning, and I went on an excellent day hike up the shoreline from Sandy Beach to Thunder Hole and Otter Cliffs, up Goreham Mountain and the Beehive (a series of cliffs made climbable without technical gear by iron railings set into the steep granite walls), down to a picturesque pond and finally up to the summit of Champlain Mountain, where I came closer to a golden eagle than I ever have before, close enough to see the curve of his beak and the claws of his talons -- a chilling experience. To cut the chill, my family ate and drank very well this week -- it's an interesting National Park experience to get your wilderness fix during the day and, that very afternoon or evening, patronize excellent restaurants serving locally-brewed beers. I recommend it.

After an evening of being wined and dined in Albany, where I congratulated my dear friends Lou & Tiffany on their recent engagement (what a ring!), I returned to Larchmont, my childhood home, to sort through my earthly possessions, put all cool-weather clothing in the attic, double-stack the bookshelves with the bulk of my extensive library, and bear continual abuse from my parents about the sheer quantity of things that I am storing at their house (thanks Mom & Dad!). A last night of carousal with Brooklyn friends at The Gate, my beloved beer-geek destination with biker bartenders, and, with two bags stuffed to the gills, I boarded a plane to San Francisco, where one of my closest friends was to meet me for a long drive into the mountains where another friend awaited us at Road's End, a trailhead. Unfortunately, due to weather conditions and the unhelpful customer service of AirTran, I ended up sleeping that night in the Atlanta airport. Please, never fly AirTran -- it's worth the extra fifty bucks...

The tedium of delay notwithstanding, our four days in the tremendous beauty of Kings Canyon National Park were unsullied by the airline's incompetance -- sure, we had to hike in to our first campsite after sunset, but I personally enjoy the experience of navigating an unfamiliar wood in the gloaming by alpenglow and starlight. We hiked up Bubbs Creek, among the ferns and giant redwoods that grew on the floor of this stunning granite canyon, whose peaks formed stately grey domes and spires and whose walls, thousands of feet high, were painted with the drips of minerals leached out from the mountains' interiors. We camped for two nights at East Lake, one of the most peaceful and beautiful spots I've had the pleasure of staying in this life, and we had a grand time climbing about the talus and fallen logs, broken memories of cataclysms past, scattered with sub-alpine forests and meadows. We saw a whole lot of wildlife -- Zach came face-to-face with a mature black bear; later we all saw a yearling cub who was scavenging in the site we'd chosen for lunch. Another lunch spot was invaded by a rattlesnake; a second rattler found a home under Jesse's pack while we'd stopped for water. We saw a mule deer with her spotted fawn (when I first saw the doe's head, poked out from the tall grass with her long, pointed ears, I thought, "My lord! That's the biggest rabbit I've ever seen!"), as well as numerous and varied lizards, rodents, and birds. It was a great backpacking trip all around.

After a couple of nights in San Francisco, including an authentic home-cooked Indian meal (thanks for the leftovers Ms. Sitaraman!) and a stint at Toronado, a bar in the Lower Haight somewhat like The Gate, Zach drove me to the airport to begin my new Hawaiian life. I sat next to a very interesting character, a man in his seventies, afflicted by Parkinson's, who's worked in Recreation his whole life, summers at a camp in Yosemite, the rest of the year in the SF Parks Department. The connections he still has with kids that he's watched grow up year after year are enviable, and he continues to mentor youth through the YMCA, though his affliction keeps him from snowboarding with them as he'd like to. An incredibly interesting, inspirational man, he assured me to do something that I enjoy. I hope I can spend the next couple of years following that advice. Anyhow, to return to my island vacation that will somehow transition to my return to academia, I'm supposed to go attend a hula festival, so I must awaken my host. Later today we have plans to hike to the Manoa Falls, and then up a mountain from which we can view them. It's been raining all morning, so I assume they'll be fairly stunning. Pictures coming soon, but you can see what I've got so far from the link to my flickr page on the left side of the top of this page.

2007-07-02T10:26:00.000-04:00

O, where have the days of June gone?
Sun-drenched storerooms of memories,
Floods of pints of ale, green leaves, from
Field trips through firefly evenings…

Indeed, the blue moon that hung above the dirty motel of my last posting has waned, and another, the color of dusty roads, has waxed and now wanes in kind before I have had a few free minutes to recount the innumerable pleasures and pains that have, like the moon, presented themselves this past month, once shining brilliantly, yet slowly fade from the mind’s eye. As I sit and reflect on all that has passed, the wonderful times I’ve shared with family and friends, collegues and students, dart like minnows; some are entrapped, entering my narrative of my final month in Brooklyn; others dart through the clenching fingers of consciousness, to reappear in my dreams through the shadowy glass of the unconscious.

For want of space, and out of concern for alienating my already-limited readership, below I simply set forth the highlights of the last five weeks in a rough chronological order:

- A beautiful wedding on my friend’s land in Gettysberg, PA; the ceremony took place in a circle of trees behind their house, the happy couple literally surrounded by friends and family with tasty microbrews in hand, followed up the makeshift aisle by their two dogs.

- Giving the finger to the Presidential convoy on their way to Arlington National Cemetery from the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day.

- Wrapping up our after-school program by sending each gleeful student home with an aquarium that he or she constructed, complete with guppies and aquatic plants.

- Going to Pittsburgh to see my friend’s absolutely gorgeous glass sculpture (pictures will be posted when I get them). Also, ripping open the back of my undewear going down a nearby « natural water slide » (great fun).

- Attending jaw-dropping ballet performances with my parents and sister (despite sleeping through a few of them).

- My new favorite ad on the subway (« Over 50 ? Get a colonoscopy – NOW ! ») and imagining how impractical it would be to follow that advice literally.

- Field trips, even though we got kicked out of the Museum of Natural History.

- Camping with an old friend beside the beach in North Carolina’s Outer Banks beneath an incredibly starry summer sky in the midst of the most fantastic swarm of fireflies I have ever seen.

- Dancing bhangra to Wilco late-night in a posh TriBeCa wine bar.

- Being caught in a thunderstorm in Prospect Park and ending up back at these girls’ apartment playing Balderdash.

- Surprise going-away parties thrown for me by my roommate and by the other teachers on my team, as well as the astounding pop-up going-away cards my students made me out of construction paper and Scotch tape.

- The awesome going-away party that I threw myself with growlers of delicious local beers, during which my apartment was improbably full of highly attractive women.

- Finishing that horrid Earth Science class and heading straight to the Mermaid Parade and a fun birthday barbecue.

- Running into a student from my first year who, despite the trauma of having been in that class, is doing excellently in high school, academically and athletically, and is the very vision of a strong, beautiful, young black woman.

- An incredible meal at San Dominico in honor of my sister’s birthday – yolk-filled ravioli in black truffle butter, stuffed rabbit saddle with fennel marmelade, excellent Italian wine, and a homemade chocolate truffle cake to knock your socks off.

- Showing ET to the students during the last week of school and realizing, at the very moment where Eliott calls his brother « penis-breath » at the dinner table, that I was involved in a very important cultural transmission.

- Dancing my ass off at the end-of-term party, where I was told by a PTA organizer that I was "smokin" and by a Carribean assistant principal that I "had the calypso feeling".

All in all, a hell of a month, even without all of the random nights spent carousing, the insanity that is being a middle-school teacher in June, the moments wherein I am overwhelmed by the beauty of Brooklyn, its architecture, its parks and tree-lined sidewalks, its diversity leading to unique communities and interactions. I was thankful for having been too busy to mope these past few weeks, because my block will decidedly not be the same if and when I return, who knows who will still be around in light of the massive construction that will be going on.

The night I packed my apartment, a massive thunderstorm raged on. Forks of lightning illuminated the block, spread clearly through the clouded skies above the row of buildings across the avenue. Rolling cracks of thunder resounded at such volumes that the first one made me cry out and my roommate thought that a bookcase had fallen over. As one of the eight trigrams used in Chinese divination, Thunder, the eldest son of the marriage between Heaven and Earth, represents movement and change. Though the University of Hawaii has an ethnically diverse student body and Honolulu has some of the decrepit urban charm for which I am a sucker, there are undoubtably great changes at work in my little world.

But I am currently on vacation from such concerns, as I am in the midst of nine days celebrating New England and the people I love here. I just attended a wedding in Rhode Island between two friends from Hamilton whom I have not seen in years and years – an event that brought many fellow alumni to a very beautiful setting to spend quality time with some very beautiful people. I am currently in Vermont with my family, where from we will head to spend the Fourth with our cousins in Mass., before heading up to Maine where we will experience some of the East Coast’s most reknowed rugged landscapes in Arcadia National Park. Following our return to New York, I have a couple of days to organize my belongings and say some goodbyes before I fly to California for a camping trip in King’s Canyon en route to my new home in the Hawaiian Islands. So forgive me if I take another couple of weeks to post again. I’m in transition.

Away In A Meth Den

2007-05-29T13:39:00.000-04:00

As I lie here sweating in a manger of a motel room, listening to my roommate struggle to breathe, I am silently glad that the junkies in the parking lot stopped breaking windows before they got to ours, and I wonder if things might have turned out differently if we’d never followed that Star of Bethlehem, or if we’d followed it to its final destination, the banana factory.

This evening, a friend from college is getting married at his home in Gettysburg, PA, where he teaches anthropology at the local college. Despite, or perhaps due to, my imminent departure Brooklyn in five weeks, and the consequent acceleration of time’s passing that always precedes such phenomena, I decided to make a real road trip out of the holiday weekend. My roommate McGregor had been eager to take a road trip before I left, and so it was a done deal. Of course, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to find lodging in the vicinity of our nation’s second most famous National Cemetery for Memorial Day weekend. As it turns out, the real culprits weren’t the suspect seniors, clogging the hotel lobbies with their Civil War re-enactment garb and oxygen masks (one of which I wish I had on hand to clap over my roommate’s snoring muzzle), but hordes of prepubescent girls that proved the proverbial flies in our figurative ointment. You’d think that working in a middle school for four years, I’d have seen that coming.

The local women working the desks at the various hotel chains seemed amused at our attempt to locate a room without a reservation. “Dontcha know? There’s not a vacancy anywhere in Gettysburg this weekend… Girl’s soccer tournament.” While the rest of the country flocks to the beaches, grills meat over lumps of coal, and drunkenly watches the Boy Scouts and VFW parade through town, here in south-central PA the traditional kickoff to summer is the commercial frenzy to service a mass congregation of tween soccerettes and their ever-supportive family units. Somehow, amidst the girls’ squealing and the thunderous clamor of their bare feet running to and from the pool area, Amanda, the greatest employee of the world’s greatest Days Inn (in 2006, by the company’s own estimation) not only managed to make us a reservation at an inexpensive motor inn in Hanover, about a half-hour away, but printed us up door-to-door MapQuest directions. Gettysburg is good people.

We pulled up into the parking lot of the Clearview Motor Inn into what appeared to be a scene from “Cops.” Two young white guys in wife beaters eyed us from the concrete porch in front of a room with an open door, which abruptly closed. A strung out looking dude with a tattooed skull got up from his plastic lawnchair and scurried into the shadows. One of the beefy looking kids asked us if we wanted "to party". The funny thing is, I rarely think twice about these things in Thailand – it’s simply, “Okay, those guys are drug dealers, and that guy’s a junkie, and there are the prostitutes… What should we do for dinner?” But, for whatever reason, here in my homeland, even though I have a cell phone and know how to communicate with the police, it all seems so much sketchier.

Needless to say, we made sure the room had a deadbolt, and we keep our possessions with us at all times -- I’ve certainly stayed in worse accomodation -– however, I think we’re going to be moving on. Why? We were awakened at about five A.M. by the sound of glass breaking and a voice yelling, “F@%k you, Jamie! Come get some!” From what Jamie told the police, I guess her boyfriend found out where she had been sleeping (and if he'd been able to see in, with whom).

But if we’d only spent a little longer enjoying the sights of eastern Pennsylvania – from Easton’s Weyerbacher Brewing Company, where we were feted with samples of their various tasty brews (relax, mom – eight samples at ½ oz. each works out to a quarter of a pint, which is well below the legal limit, even for "Blithering Idiot", Weyerbacher's barleywine), to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, from whence McGregor’s family left for down South (apparently there wasn’t a lot going on there back in the day either). But we knew we’d found a good place when, searching for the Lost River Caverns, we saw the star. Mystified at first by the signs in heavenly blue (“Follow the star to Bethlehem attractions” and “Let Bethlehem glitter, please don’t litter!”), we became entranced by the obvious scheming of a hyperactive Chamber of Commerce. It drew us right into town, which had a certain charm, something a lot of former industrial towns cannot claim, but we soon shook off the trance of the star and reprioritized. Did we really want to see Bethlehem’s Banana Factory? The Pennsylvania Dutch Miniature Village? Or the wonders of the earth, parceled out in $9.50 portions?

I’m glad we ended up making it to the caverns, but perhaps, if only we’d dallied a little longer in Bethlehem, we might have pulled over for the night during the frightful storm yesterday evening. As it is, unable to find lodging in any of the area’s inns due to an annual pilgrimage, we’ve slept within these unsavory walls, albeit, in two queen-sized beds. Who knows what light morning brings? Are we the wise men from the East? We number but two... In any case, the decision to stay here, perhaps not the wisest.

Light and Shadow

2007-05-20T09:54:00.001-04:00

So, two Saturdays ago, as I was bicycling down to my unfunny joke of a geology course, I got a phone call from a classmate informing me that there was no class this week. I was beside myself with joy – it was as if suddenly a heavy burden had been replaced with a full-body massage. I biked down to the Prospect Park boathouse, a beautiful Victorian-era building beside the Lullwater, a languorous green pond that links the cascades of the ravine to the lake below. I put my bike down on the dock, emptied my pockets, and practiced some yoga amidst the birdsong and the dappled light streaming through the new leaves, a mottled green canopy topping the trees surrounding the pond, thrusting skyward. I felt my body pulsing with life, like those trees, connecting the earth and the heavens, the axis mundi.

I remounted my bicycle, rejuvenated, and took the high path to Mt. Prospect. Around this peak, the borough’s highest, is a Revolutionary War battlefield, where 400 Maryland soldiers laid down their lives to stall the Brits so that Washington and the rest of the troops could make it to the harbor, to cross over to Jersey and safety. That morning, the most strife I observed was the grumbling of teenagers who’d been conscripted into community service, shoveling dirt off of the crumbling pavement leading to the mountaintop, where birders quietly stood transfixed by some tiny feathered soul, singing its heart out to the world. Walking my bike, circumambulating the peak, I came across a man dressed in all black engaged in a curious practice: moving like a cat amidst the trees, he would throw a ring attached to a long rope; as he retracted the ring, he would swing a short wand, which had a hook protruding from its midsection. With his ring and wand, I assumed it was some form of tantric magic, but he told me it was a Japanese martial art practice, that the ring stuns your opponent, the scythe knocks them down, and the rope ties them up. I watched his slow dance for a few more minutes, and rode on.

I ended up at the Brooklyn waterfront, where people were riding to increase awareness about a new park to stretch from Atlantic Avenue all the way up the river to the current park under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. I met up with a friend, and we sat in the springtime sunlight, watching the tugboats, barges, and sailboats dance between the monumental architecture of the bridges. I convinced her to join me in a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, where we sat on a dock and shared a banana split for breakfast. We then rendez-vous’d with two other friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen in many moons, and strolled through Park Slope, beneath the outstretched arms of the blossoming trees that line every block of brownstones. Again, the sunlight cascaded through the tree branches, highlighting the flowers and the new leaves against the dark wood. Stoop sales were being held throughout the neighborhood, and I picked up a number of wonderful items on the cheap. We sat and had a beer on the stoop of my friend’s old building, where I bought a beautiful hand-thrown vase for my mom’s birthday.

I returned home that afternoon earlier than I would have if I’d been in class, feeling full from the sunlight, the ice cream, the beer, and the love of my friends, and of the spirit of Brooklyn, a remarkably beautiful place to spend springtime. I lay down on the couch, and one of my oldest buddies called. I remember feeling incredibly lucky. “Hey man, I’ve got some really bad news. Arthur Harris hung himself. The funeral’s tomorrow.” Instantly, all of the wonders of my day seemed so inconsequential, shadowed by the untimely death caused by our high school friend’s dark mind.

I have to say, it wasn’t completely unexpected. I hadn’t seen Artie for a few years, but he’d had a dark outlook on life back in high school, which is when he began self-medicating his depression with booze: not a great remedy. The last time I’d seen him, drinking at the bar by the train station in our suburban hometown, he’d been down on everything – his parents, his job, women, politics – but he was completely full of love for his little brother, Robbie. And so really what crossed my mind was, “Artie, how could you do this to Robbie?” Had his self-loathing grown to eclipse the fraternal love he’d so often professed? I began the difficult task of calling our other friends with the news.

The next day I had two memorial services to go to. The first, at my childhood temple, was for another high school friend whose father, a well-known oncologist, had passed away after struggling for years with a brain tumor. His service was full of levity and laughter – it was truly a celebration of life. It was by no means a whitewash job – though I didn’t know the deceased well, his characteristic argumentativeness and cutting wit came out in his tributes – but everyone in attendance had a good laugh. My friend Jonas read his father’s self-penned eulogy, apologizing in advance to the rabbi if it was not kosher. “But,” Jonas quipped, “we’re having him cremated, so what’s one more shanda?” His father’s words began, “Maybe they were right. Maybe I’m being welcomed by 72 virgins right now…” The doctor’s irreverence and good humor until the end were completely evident.

Artie’s service was, understandably, much heavier. Though there were a lot of people from high school there, none of us got up to speak. All of his eulogizers, save the rabbi, were college friends, one of whom read a piece that Artie had written about how he’d been a pretty big screw-up and was contemplating falling into the void. How to balance that with the cherry trees outside the temple, heavy with blossoms, the delicate matrix of their petals capturing the sunlight with complex beauty?

The rabbi had said that Arthur J. Harris died of a disease called depression. I acknowledge that mental illness is all-too-real, and it’s an area that our finest doctors still don’t fully understand, but I’m not ready to say that Artie couldn’t have made choices to help in his treatment, to help relieve his suffering. On the one hand, his suffering is over; on the other, he’s simply managed to pass it along to his mother and Robbie, who have to bear the burden of Artie’s actions for the rest of their days.

I went up that week to sit shiva, the Jewish custom of having friends and family come over to the house of the bereaved to pay their respects and eat pastries. As expected, the place was a madhouse – I could barely get in the front door. After the religious service, the place started clearing out. Robbie, with whom I’d wanted to speak, ran off with his friends, as eighth graders are wont to do, and a couple of friends and I decided to stick around to talk to Artie’s mom.

She was holding up pretty well, considering she’d lost her son a few days earlier, although I think one of the functions of a shiva is to keep you busy with guests so that the reality of your loss creeps in slowly. Her candor with us made evident how much Artie had told her about his personal life – she recalled a story about girls teasing Artie during ballroom dancing in sixth grade – and she basically believes that his frustrations with women was a major source of his depression. It turns out that Arthur was the press secretary for State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and that he was doing an incredible job, keeping Cuomo on the front page of the Times practically every day for a month. She said that his colleagues had told her this was unheard of, that Artie was incredibly good at what he did.

So, Robbie, why did your brother see only the darkness? I’m not sure, but I hope his example inspires you to do the opposite. Sometimes acknowledging the shadow allows us to realize that darkness is a function of light. When something appears to block our perspective, it’s easy to think that it is the end-all-be-all. We forget that all things, in time, shall pass: that this too, as terrible as it may be, shall pass. Wherever there is darkness, it is bordered by light. Once we can see the darkness for what it is, a temporary phenomenon beyond our control, we can begin to control our response to this phenomenon, opening the potential for seeing new things. After our eyes get over the sight of the dark vase, we can relax our gaze and beings of light emerge to comfort us. One of my dearest friends had the same experience at the same age and is now undoubtedly one of the most life-affirming people on the planet – the loss of his brother ultimately aroused his spirit into the desire to suck out every drop of experience this world has to offer. You have eternity to be dead – our days are short, live them well.

Rest in peace, Artie. We miss you.

An Unfunny Joke

2007-05-20T09:53:00.000-04:00

This semester, I have spent most of my Saturdays attending the gravest waste of time that I’ve experienced since a few years ago when I last took education courses at Brooklyn College. I don’t know why classes for teachers taught by teachers have to be so atrocious in every respect. I feel that the attitude unconsciously expressed by the professor is: “We all have a lot of other, more important stuff going on in our lives, so let’s just show up, kill some time, I’ll give you some joke assignments and you’ll turn something in and everybody gets an A.” I hate this crap.

The course was supposed to be 6 credits in geology at the graduate level. The problems with the course are twofold. First, the student population is completely split in two – half of the class are career teachers with little to no knowledge of science who are fulfilling a distribution requirement for their Masters, which has become necessary thanks to No Child Left Behind, and the other half are earth science teachers who are trying to become certified in their subject area, a difficult venture as New York State only recognizes certain geology courses (such as the farce in which I am enrolled) as valid, whereas the infinitely more challenging geology classes I took at Hamilton don’t count for a sack of bureaucrats.

Regardless, part of the problem with this class is that half of us could ace the Earth Science Regents while blind drunk, and the other half would require a few months of intensive coaching to eke out a passing grade. The other problem is the professor, who has done honor to the term “incompetent”. It’s hard to decide which part of his incompetence to focus on. The man routinely walks out of class for up to an hour at a time to “make photocopies”, leaving us with the same worksheets that he assigns his high school students, which the teachers of earth science scoff at because it’s the same basic stuff that we teach our middle school students, but which thoroughly confuse the others, because they’ve never been taught the material. When he does attempt to teach, he routinely confuses the most basic principles of science, as well as confusing most of the students, with his claims that oceanic crust sinks below continental crust “because it’s lighter” or that, as cool air moves to a warmer area, it cools down.

Worse, the course gives no sense of the breadth of the material – it would be difficult enough to cover the entire discipline in twelve meetings even if he didn’t dedicate five of them to discussing how carbon dioxide affects climate change. The entirety of this surreal experience could be summarized in a single anecdote: the professor wanted to show us an episode of “Scooby Doo Adventures” where the Mystery Machine crew go down to Antarctica to combat global warming, despite the fact that he had clearly demonstrated a week earlier that that we could not use the DVD player because we didn’t have the right cables. This is supposed to be a graduate level class in geology; it leaves me feeling dirty – like I’m simply trading time and money for credits. During his desperate fumbling with the DVD player, I walked out of class, got on my bike, and met my friend Esther at the Botanic Gardens for a resplendent afternoon amidst the cherry trees and the blooming tulips. When I returned two hours later, nothing had happened. It may be a joke class, but it’s no longer funny.

Tropical Fantasy Is Reality

2007-04-29T18:07:00.000-04:00

I awoke before dawn to a riot of birdsong. They seemed to be urging me to go outside, to climb a mountain. Stepping out into the darkness, I found myself awash in a sea of wet, heavy air punctuated by fragrant flowering bushes and fig trees that their improbably massive silver boughs outward into the night sky. Oh, yeah. I’m in Hawaii.

I arrived yesterday afternoon, and immediately went back into my miserly tropical tourist mode (it must be that spending so much on airfare affects the fiscal centers in my brain – I’m not this cheap in New York), eschewing the taxis and tourist shuttles for the local bus, just as I am wont to do when arriving in Bangkok. I hiked up to my weekend housing on UH-Manoa campus from downtown Honolulu, and was amazed by my homing sense – I’m staying in the same building where my study abroad sangha lodged on our way home from Japan back in ’99, and I was able to find it without much hassle.

The flora here is as unbelievable as I remember – pretty much every tree or shrub has a beautiful blossom, a crazy seed pod, some killer broad leaves, wildly peeling bark, or some combination thereof. Birds of paradise outside of Burger King, and frangipani petals litter the sidewalks.

For those of you who don’t know, I got a good offer to spend two years pursuing a M.A. in Religion at the University of Hawaii – Manoa. For reasons to be elucidated elsewhere (one of my sixth graders used “elucidate” in her essay about global warming this week [incorrectly, but I appreciate her burgeoning lexicon]), I’ve felt a bit ambivalent about what is undeniably a fantastic opportunity. So I came out for a long weekend to make up my mind. After about eight waking hours on the island, I’m feeling pretty good about it. At this rate, I can’t imagine disliking the faculty (whom I meet tomorrow) to such an extent that I decide to stay in Brooklyn.

One of my reservations about coming here is that, after five years in New York, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of cultural events going on. On the bus ride into town, not only did we pass a $1 movie theater (currently showing 4-5 films that I’ve been wanting to see), but we became waylaid by traffic going into the SPAM Jam, of all things. Anyone who knew my middle school predilection for canned meat would be shocked to know that I did not attend this street festival in honor of Hormel’s tinned ham, but I was a bit weary, my pack was a bit heavy, and the crowd was a bit raucous. I know, I know. I’ll go next year.

Another misconception overturned: being spoiled by the mid-Atlantic beer renaissance, I was figuring that I’d have to basically brew my own to get good beer in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was wrong. A bar just off of campus has over a hundred taps, from all over the world, and mugs are three bucks or under. It’s also attached to a sushi bar (where I had ahi poke last night – a kind of Hawaiian teriyaki salad with big chunks of raw tuna – yum) and a decent pizzeria (& I’m a harsh critic when it comes to pizza).

Also, there is a ton of diversity here on campus, to the point where there’s a flyer up in the building in which I’m staying for students to “document” their languages before they disappear (I guess a lot of Pacific Islanders come here), and I overheard a conversation last night where a girl was saying how hard life was for people in her village. You don’t hear that in New York all the time. Plus, as evidence for the Asian population, an entire section of the open-air kitchen on each floor (yes, I said open-air kitchen -- the one on the 12th floor has killer views of Diamond Head and Manoa Valley) is dedicated to rice cookers. Finally, there is a type of gritty urban life here (despite the paradisiacal setting) which I was afraid I would miss – I saw neighborhoods downtown that had people chilling on the corner, with tags sprayed on the walls.

Yeah, I scared the crap out of a mongoose this morning. I haven’t met the faculty, or even been down to the beach yet, but I think I’m moving here.

[Side Note: I realize the title of this post won't mean anything to anyone, but it amuses me, so I guess I should write a footnote with the references. Tropical Fantasy is the name of the ghetto-ass soda / fruit drinks that my students insist on calling "juice" despite the fact that any self-respecting piece of fruit has never been near that bottle (a couple of whorish peices of produce were convinced to pose for the label). Fantasy Is Reality is a Parliament tune that I've never been that into, but it sure is catchy. I've quoted it twice in my last few blogs, which says something about its "stick-in-your-head"ness, but it really breaks up the flow of Motor Booty Affair. END TRANSMISSION.]

(Paradise) Lost

2007-04-29T18:06:00.000-04:00

The easiest way to describe what Manoa looks like is that it’s pretty much like where the Others live (on Lost), except they’ve been here for about a hundred years so they have cars and stuff. But of course that’s what it looks like, because they shoot Lost in Hawaii. Kind of a dumb analogy, I guess.

But I think my reservations about coming out here are nicely encapsulated in the tension experienced by the show’s characters. Even though pretty much every character on the show had something terrible going on in their home life, something to run away from, pretty much every character on the show wants to get the hell off of the island. But how many times while I’ve been watching the show have I thought to myself, why in the world would these people want to leave? Aside from the fact that most of them have nothing to go back to, they’re living on a beautiful tropical island eating fresh fish, fruit, and roast boar. They don’t have a real job, and they’re part of an interdependent community with a disproportionate number of hotties. What’s the problem?

Well, my problem is this. I don’t have anything to run away from. I’ve got a pretty sweet life in New York right now – I love my job, I’m close to my family, I’ve got great friends, and I live in a great neighborhood. The only real reason to move on is if I’m going towards something that I really care about. If that were simply getting another degree so I’d be closer to my doctorate, which means that I could enter the highly competitive market for a tenure track position at an institute of higher education, I’m not sure I’d do it right now. However, I’ve come to believe what I wrote in my application essay, which is that two years of studying a phenomenon in which I’m genuinely interested (new religions that do energy healing) is an end in itself. Plus I’m really into fresh papaya.

Rainbows and Crap

2007-04-29T18:05:00.001-04:00

So, walking back from my morning hike I saw a rainbow rising up from downtown (which I think is pretty much a daily occurrence – UH’s team is called the Rainbows, and those arcs of the visible light spectrum grace the state license plate), and it reminded me of a recent post on my new friend Eve’s pretty awesome blog where she was asking who the hell sees indigo in the color spectrum. And it’s true – I looked real close at this rainbow – no indigo. I saw a shimmer of red, a lot of peach, which faded into orange, a real distinct yellow, a faint green, two distinct blues – sky & royal – and a shimmer of purple.

At the risk of repeating some of my comments on her post, I recently saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in the packed basement of Union Hall (Tyson, People’s Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive [but, as he said, "consider the field!"], recent author of Death By Black Hole, the most-appeared guest on "The Colbert Report", and one of the cooler supergeeks you’ll ever meet [the man carries a radiation detector, so it will beep if he gets too close to any gamma rays]), and he claimed that very few people actually see indigo and that Newton inserted indigo into the spectrum so there would be seven colors, which matches up with his mystical numerological voodoo (Newton considered his contributions to alchemy to be at least as important as his calculus or his laws of motion).

Could color vision be that subjective? Neurological research suggests that there are six visual tones (or really, three pairs of complements) which our neurons code – red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. Aristotle wrote that there were three colors in the rainbow (red, yellow, blue), and this morning, after I decided I’d write about this subject I opened a 600+ page volume, while on the john, to a page in an essay Jung wrote on alchemy where he refers to the four colors of the rainbow (red, yellow, green, blue). In East Asia, green has long been considered a shade of blue, but light grey and dark grey have different names. It all shows that there is no consensus on how many colors are in a spectrum; it matters where you draw the lines.

Colin Wilson, in The Occult, claims that, unless our color vision has evolved in the two millennia since Aristotle, it may be that our senses are becoming more sensitive to subtle nuances. He paraphrases psychical researcher Fred Myers as to say that it’s possible we have many more such latent senses to which we have not tapped in – if intuition is analogous to the basic three-color vision; clairvoyance or prognostication may be the next stage in developing that sense.

While indigo may be very difficult to see, there’s another shade of blue that stands out in the spectrum – the sky blue I saw, commonly called cyan. Scientists who study color have reached a consensus that if there are seven groupings of wavelengths in the spectrum, it’s ROY G CBV, which isn’t as easy for schoolkids to remember, but that’s science for you. If we can reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper object, we can certainly shift around the colors of the rainbow. As long as there are seven.

Of course, if indigo ain’t in the spectrum, and cyan is, what about all of those New Age chakra books that say the sixth chakra (ajna, the third eye) is indigo? To be fair, I’ve often read that the fifth (the throat chakra, whose Sanskrit name escapes me now) is sky blue, so maybe the aura readers were just prey to Newtonian tomfoolery, tricked into seeing blue as this alleged “indigo”. You see what you expect.

[funny sidenote: the first song that came on my shuffle after writing this post was The Sea & Cake’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound & Vision”, with the lines “Blue, blue, electric blue… don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?”]

It's Fo' Real

2007-04-22T10:50:00.000-04:00

I've been showing my classes An Inconvenient Truth this past week to teach about global warming (I know, I know, some of the kids find sections of it incredibly boring -- I'm basically skipping around, showing them the razzle-dazzle version, plus lots of graphs [data analysis is important, if not razzle-dazzle]), and I've been stressing the difference between changes in weather (very frequent, short-term) and changes in climate (gradual, long-term), but this is one of those weekends when you're feel like it's summer already, and then you realize that we've still got two more months of school and not all my classrooms have a/c, and the fear grows, and I'm glad I'm getting out of New York again before the city completes its annual transformation into a tropical megalopolis with fewer ladies selling sliced mango.

By the way, having watched Al Gore's images and statistics over and over again for a week, I realized that a major criticism of the film (presented in a front-page article in the Science Times) is actually a "straw man" argument -- critics say that sea level will not rise as quickly as he claimed -- instead of 20 feet by 2050, climate scientists are predicting 20 inches -- yet Gore set no date for the striking images of Florida, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Lower Manhattan disappearing beneath the onslaught of Poseidon's armies. He simply claimed that "this is what will happen if Greenland melts, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica melt", and while I haven't done the math, that is a good deal of water sliding off the continental shelf. I hope the seven preserved frogs in my closet at school are doing okay -- should they be refrigerated? I'm planning on dissecting them with my after school club this week, and it would be a major bummer if they were rotten...

But anyway, it's beautiful for now -- the warm temperatures and the trees' brilliant blossoms forced my hand yesterday, and I attended approximately three hours of my eight-hour Saturday class. While my irksomely ill-prepared professor struggled to make the sound work on the Scooby-Doo cartoon that he was trying to show us (I can't make this stuff up -- this is supposed to be a graduate-level earth science class), I walked out, pedalled furiously up Ocean Avenue, and missed the free entrance to the Botanic Gardens by ninety seconds. Oh well, it was beautiful anyway -- the magnolia blossoms and daffodils had begun to wither in the heat, but their magnificent tulips are opening, and the cherry trees in the Japanese garden are perfectly in bloom right now -- colonies of tiny pink blossoms hang from twisted black boughs like we are walking through a woodcut. Pefection in a garden, indeed. When I got back to class a couple of hours hence, nothing had happened, and I left again to get some ice cream shortly thereafter.

Well, my alcoholic neighbor Leo (he of the stubby grey dreads and the glassy red eyes) has been cranking out the reggae pop all morning (he seems to have gotten a new CD, as I am well familiar with his normal song selection -- from Country Roads to Candle In The Wind), and he seems very excited about this song that just came on. He's yelling along with it like he's at Arlene's Grocery. And yes, he's dancing on the sidewalk. What a glorious day...

Yeast Is Wicked!

2007-04-10T23:15:00.000-04:00

Well, not exactly, but that's what Passover would have you believe. Well, not exactly. It's just that when slaves are on the run from their masters, they don't have the liberty to wait for fermentation to work its magic (bread rising, beer brewing). So for eight days a year, Jews live in a world without yeast, and I can tell you, it's a sad, sad world. Instead of bread, we get crackers. Instead of delicious beer, we get crappy wine (why is pesadik wine so bad?). Yeast -- come back!

So, for the first year ever, I attempted to keep kosher for Passover. But rather than eat matzah 24-7 like most Jews, I went balls-out and multiplied my self-denial ten-fold. For a week I ate nothing but fruit, vegetables, tofu, and brown rice (I'm not Sephardic, but I play one on TV). The only oil I'd allow myself was olive (that means no delicious potato chips, even while my mom was eating them in the car and offering them to me, foul temptress...). I did excellent, that is, until Arlene's Grocery Rock & Roll Karaoke last night.

I convinced myself that whiskey was kosher (I was at a hard-rock karaoke show and not drinking beer -- the red wine they had was terrible. Am I made of stone?) The whiskey told me to sign up to sing with this hard rock band. (If you need to book entertainment for a party in the NY area, I highly recommend looking into these guys.) I got up there and sang Roadhouse Blues by The Doors (which has an awesome scat section which I remember rocking out -- we're all awaiting the videotape, which I'll post as soon as I get it). So everything was great, the crowd was diggin' it, and just before I got to the line, "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer", the band's regular singer came up and handed me an open can of PBR. What was a newly-somewhat-observant Jew to do? I was caught between listening to the God of the Old Testament and being a rock god myself. Well the rest is history -- Nietzsche would be proud of me, and my ears are still ringing. Wicked, wicked yeast...

Hooray for Yeast!

2007-04-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

Okay, one more for the day, just to brag, and this is it.

I make really freakin' good beer. I assume it's not that I'm such a super-genius (or are I?), but just that good beer is easy to make in small batches? If you don't like beer, feel free to skip down to the next post, but if you do...

Imperial Aspirations Stout: Pretty much followed the Mr. Beer directions -- this one was made with a couple of cans of syrup (the stout mix & brown malt), a bunch of dextrose, and finished it with a mix of hops (the recipe called for Willamette, but I didn't have a full ounce, so I put in some Fuggle & Saaz to boot to give it a little extra spice), and a heaping handful of espresso beans, coarsely ground. I felt a little guilty about getting the coffee flavor from beans instead of from malts, but I'm over it. Plus, it's probably lightly caffinated, so it's a good rally stout. Anyway, after six weeks of cold-conditioning, it's really rich and tasty -- nearly black, orange-brown head (crazy), tastes of hazlenut mocha (my favorite taste for stout), the bitter espresso nicely balances the sweet malts, and it's medium body and good carbonation that doesn't stop. I left my glass for almost an hour and it didn't go flat. The recipe said to cold-condition for at least three months, so I can't wait to see what happens next!

6 Gage IPA: Named after our buddy who used to work in a homebrew shop and gave us the recipe, this was the first time I made a beer using actual grains. There were a lot of different grains, including toasted barley malt and Crystal Wheat. Also some light dry malt extract. We used a ton of Cascade hops for boiling, and some Kent Golding hops for finishing. After the first fermentation, we added some more Cascade to dry hop. Last night we bottled this ale, and poured ourselves a couple of glasses, cask style. Damn it was good, even warm and (nearly) flat! Orange-red color, very aromatic of fruity hops (that's that Cascade -- it's very hard for me to determine exactly what fruit it smells like -- orange-peach?) An excellently balanced ale with sweet fruit complemented with bitter and spice. I'm so proud. I can't wait to see what it's like in another couple of weeks (one week at room temp, one week cold-conditioning).

I can't believe I've become such a big beer-geek, but I think I'm prouder of this than for having organized and supervised frog and rat dissections by my 6th grade students last week (which is what I was going to post about until I tried these beers last night -- I'll post some gory pics of viscera later in the week...). Fermentation is amazing -- I'd love to try to make some sour beer, where you ferment your ingredients before you make your wort! Crazy.

Spirals And Stuff

2007-04-02T10:55:00.000-04:00

So, that last one was a little heavy. Here's something (a little) lighter. Wait, first go look at these beautiful bacterial fractals (as pictured to the right). I'll wait.

Wasn't that cool? Anyway, I awoke early in the predawn a couple of mornings ago from a very cool dream in which my father taught me how to create ephemeral sculptures of magical ash that would take solid form for a few glowing seconds before they crumpled to the floor and vanished. The exhileration of completing my first attempt, a three-dimensional spiral which looped and whorled and filled the room, was enough to wake me from my slumber and fill me with awe.

Wide awake in a witching hour, I opened my computer to continue an tutorial on General Semantics (much more interesting than it sounds -- check it out when you get ten minutes free), and when I clicked to advance to the next screen, I was a bit surprised to see a big spiral (this was probably about 90 seconds after I'd woken up from the dream). I looked away from the computer, and right there was a single hair, curled up in perfect spiral. Pretty cool, huh?

Synchronicity or apophenia? You decide. But on the apophenic tip, check out Wikipedia's awesome list of religious pareidolia (e.g. the "grilled cheese Jesus"). By clicking on the footnotes, you can go to the primary source and see the "pizza pan Virgin" or Jesus in a dog's tuchus. It's all pretty amazing, for both the accuracy and the inanity of some of the apparations. I think that this dental x-ray one is pretty weird, myself.

Faithless Liberation

2007-04-02T07:24:00.000-04:00

"His disciples asked him and said,

'Do you want us to fast?
How shall we pray?
Shall we give to charity?
What food may we eat?'

Jesus said, 'Do not lie or do what you dislike, since all things are clear before heaven."

- The Gospel of Thomas

"What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions."

- Shadows on the Hudson, Isaac Bashevus Singer

It's been over a month since I've written, but I was recently inspired by somebody else's cool blog that not every post has to be an epic piece. In that spirit, I'll try to spin off a few shorter ones to encapsulate the divided existence I've been leading of late.

First of all, I've been doing a lot of reading on New Age spirituality, which is a subject I have been considering as a subject of research for graduate school. I was originally drawn to the field because it was "fringe"; the New Age appeals to my taste for cognitive dissonance in its rejection of the material world through thousand dollar seminars, its followers' combination of rational and magical thinking, and their application of archaic belief to a postmodern world. And, as perhaps good research should, it has made me begin to question my own beliefs.

The Reform synagogue in which I was brought up valued questioning over most nearly everything. To follow the commandments "just because" seems an empty affair in our age of scientistism. I remember being taught to be critical of even the pillars of our Law -- the two tablets with their proclamations of religious and secular code -- and being taught that it was revealed to Moses because of his doubts and the transgressions of the Israelites. The lesson I came away with was that the pared-down faith that results from the trials of questioning is more authentic, more resilient, more personal than that of dogma and orthodoxy.

Studying existentialism at college, I was impressed by Kierkegaard's idealisation of Abraham, afraid and trembling on Moriah, as a 'knight of faith'. I sympathised with Schopenhauer's suffering from insatiable desire, and his will to escape through art. But more than any other author I read at Hamilton, I was taken by Nietzsche: by his confidence, his daring, his artistry; by his assertion that we are the gods, and to continue to project our best characteristics onto fictional external entities is to cheat ourselves of our finest riches. And would you just look at that 'stache? I sensed in his writings that which I admired in Emerson -- the call to write our own Bibles, the claim that "nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

And the words of Nietzsche and Emerson continue to inspire and resonate with me, but their deification of self, which, via cultural refraction has led to the self-spirituality of the New Age, now strikes me as dangerously narcissisitic. (Here's a link to a quality interesting article on the tension between religion and spirituality that lauds self-spirituality's history for inspiring social justice, but is critical of its contemporary self-absorption.) Yet it is taught within Buddhism that compassion should only be practiced once one has acquired the wisdom and discrimination necessary to apply it effectively.

But the question I have on the eve of Pesach, the Jewish holiday when we commemmorate the Israelites' liberation from bondage by "our God and the God of Moses" by ritually tasting salt water and bitter herbs to relive the tears and bitterness of slavery followed by feasting and reclining to celebrate our freedom, is how to balance spiritual seeking with cultural tradition? I love this holiday for so many reasons -- it teaches about compassion, the food is great, we sing "Dayenu" -- yet I have issue with believing that the spirits I believe are praiseworthy are "one" with He who slew the Egyptians' firstborn. The very meaning of "Pass-over" is tied into the Angel of Death buying our freedom with mass infanticide. Troubling.

And as I eat my Hillel sandwich tonight, the delight I take in our freedoms here-and-now, the sweetness of the charoset will be tempered by the bitterness of the horseradish. It makes me cry involuntarily, tears that fall for not only for the oppressed, whom the Haggadah mentions, but for the innocents who will die for the liberation of the oppressed, whom it does not. So does doubt strengthen faith? If not, I think it makes one more authentic and thoughtful. But then again, if you've got the faith of Abraham, you get to make bad-ass graphics like this one with the Lion of Judah, and never think twice about it. So I guess it's a trade-off. Oh well, I guess this wasn't exactly a shorter piece. Sorry. Pesach Shameach!

Coming Together

2007-02-27T20:57:00.000-05:00

Alright, so I may have had lofty ambitions for that last post, but they've long since dissolved back into their component neurotransmitters, awaiting the next stir of the neural swizzle stick. Let it simply be said that it's been a week of surpassing goals that I set for myself, from making tele-turns down the sheer face of High Rustler to outperforming my target score on the GREs. Sunday night, to clear a little room in our brew-fridge, making space for my espresso-infused Imperial Aspirations Stout I bottled before Utah (which I've avowed to be the last batch I make without fresh ingredients), I finished the last 4 ounces of the first beer I'd ever made, Steiny's Trippel Threat, brewed almost exactly a year ago. It was seriously good; it had matured from a citrusy, spicy abbey-style ale into almost a barley-wine; flavors of port rose up that I rarely find even in the strong ales of the best breweries. Quite happy. Happy enough that I can put off griping about a dentist stealing the leadership of Turkmenistan and fantasize about Iranian ski vacations until I'm a little less exhausted. Bedtime.

Viva La Free-Heel Revolucion!

2007-02-23T00:50:00.000-05:00

Okay, so maybe it's not going to change anything politically (oh, why did Turkmenbashy have to be succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow?), but tele-skiing is really fun. [NOTE: I'm not sure how long this post is going to be, but it's fairly definitely going to be devoid of any examination of the occult meanings of performance art -- I more or less just told you what it's all about -- Central Asian political drama and the exhilerating, if improbable, sensation of sketching a parabola down a smooth mountainside while in a goofy looking half-lunge.]

A ski instructor told me that the geology of the Cottonwood Canyons is nearly unique -- the only other place where storm systems move from a large body of water (like the Great Salt Lake) immediately to desert mountains (like the Wasatch) is in Iran, where storms apparently suck moisture out of the Caspian and drop dumps of dry powder on the Alborz mountains.

Okay, they're closing the bar where I get wi-fi. this is a post-in-progress. stay tuned.

Me Likey The Freshy Pow Pows

2007-02-20T18:35:00.000-05:00

Oh, everything's nice. The sun is at my back as I sit in a glass-enclosed atrium this Mardi Gras afternoon, surrounded by august snowy peaks, weary body slowly sated by pints of highly-hopped muscle relaxant, mind floating between the brass bands swinging out the bar's speakers and reflections on the three wild days I've had so far, soaring and swooping down soft mountainsides, weaving between trees and cliffs, literally floating inches above the ground suspended in a shallow sea of dry ice crystals. Yeah, I'll try not to rub it in, but...

Sunday was a sunny day where the locals were complaining of "ice" (in reality, slightly crusted packed powder), where I had a good time schussing and sailing in warm sunlight under bluest skies. That night, the snow started, and when it was all over, about 24 hours later, over a foot of the light powder for which this region is famed had covered every surface. Yesterday, between the incomperable conditions and my ever-growing confidence in the positive outcome of pointing my greased platforms straight down a steep declivity, could have been my greatest day ever on skis if not for the ceiling dropping around 2 PM, rendering the mountainside (and its resident obstacles) invisible. Either way, it was pretty stupendous -- invisible mounds beneath the soft snow directing my rented Volkl Mantras (om mani padme hum) this way and that, and I could just sit back (not too far) and enjoy the ride.

Today was also fairly wonderful, despite my aching body (though falls in this newly-cushioned world are immediately painless, pulled muscles play catch up while you sleep). I pushed through to explore parts of this mountainscape that previously intimidated me, either with aformentioned cliff and dense forests, or with the hike-to access. And now I feel fully satisfied -- I've expanded my limits, decreased my cowardice, uncovered the hidden areas, and worked my body senseless with two days to go. Perhaps tomorrow I'll either take some time off or try something new -- Snowbird's up the street, or I can turn in my rentals for telemarks... I guess I should also fill out my grad school applications. I'm sure it will work out. Another storm's supposed to roll in tomorrow -- I guess that might make up my mind for me...

It's Vacation Time Again!

2007-02-17T23:09:00.000-05:00

I love being a teacher -- not only do I get to hang out with a bunch of twelve-year olds all day around whom (once a baseline level of mutual respect has been established) it's completely acceptable to be goofy and make bad jokes (wonderful for an exceedingly goofy jokester such as myself), and the inherent sense of accomplishment from "shaping young minds", but, on top of our ten "sick" days, we get all of these sweet vacations. I'm currently in the lobby of the Gold Miner's Daughter, at the base of Alta, a ski resort that's near the top of my short list of favorite locations on our planet. In case you don't know, Alta is home to the best snow in the region with the greatest snow on earth -- it regularly gets dumps of "champagne powder", snow so dry and light that its crystals effervescently sparkle in the air as a ephemeral memory of some lucky schusser's flight down the steep walls of Little Cottonwood Canyon. If that weren't enough, the GMD is an amazing spot -- regardless of its complete lack of pretention, it has a happening bar scene, great food, a couple of hot tubs and a decent pool table. Plus, since the dorms were full, I got a private room with a king-size bed for the same price. Nice.

Must be off to slumberland soon to ensure some early runs before it gets too soft tomorrow (spring skiing conditions as the temperature is expected to near 50 F), but wanted to quickly relate my experience last night seeing Sonic Youth at Webster Hall. The fifth time I've seen this veteran group of audionauts, and by far the best -- their explorations, setting layers of guitar dissonance and explosions over rhythms alternating between open-ended spaciness and tight funky rock, unfolded like a great page-turner -- I was continuously in a state of disbelief at how much I was enjoying myself, couldn't wait to see what they'd play next, and, despite wanting it to go on and on, I was completely satisfied at show's end. The superfans that I was standing next to were freaking out at the song selection and said they'd never seen a show like it. Kudos to Kim, Thurston, Lee, Jim, and Scott -- at the top of their game after 24 years. If anyone reading this happens to be in Burlington tomorrow (or in Mexico next week, or Japan in April...) do yourself a favor and blow your mind. For the rest of us, here's a clip of them playing one of my favorite songs from their last album at CBGB's before it closed. Concise perfection, and I love Kim's dancing.

Constuction/Perception

2007-02-04T10:07:00.000-05:00

Well, jury duty wrapped up nicely. Though it ended up being only four days off of work, I feel that the lax hours and my indulgent lunches downtown helped ring in a new era for my adult life. Plus I got a nice notepad that doubles as a datebook.

I have not been stressing work that much (aside from wanting to strangle a few children who have a serious aversion to conscious thought), I have been eating and drinking quite well (it all goes in the mouth, don't breathe while you swallow, all that good stuff), seeing great live music, and just generally enjoying the sensations and perceptions that make up this existence. There's a Master's program at the University of Amsterdam to which I'm excited about applying and I have various other projects brewing this month to fill my hours. Furthermore, I continue to encounter a seemingly endless stream of interesting writers and artists who make my brain hum pleasurably.

I recently finshed two books by Daniel Pinchbeck, a very bright and engaging author whose writing has somewhare crossed the line between a journalistic features piece on shamanism and prophecy to the writings of a shamanic prophet. Though I think his work must be taken with few grains of salt, I also feel it can not be taken lightly. His first book, a foray into contemporary shamanism in traditional and modern societies, describes his psychedelic experiences with invisible worlds which transform him from an alienated materialist urbanite into a shamanic apprentice with no incarnate teacher. He writes that the sickness of our society stems from a cultural wall that has been established beween our bodies and our spirits; despite our massive advances in technological applications of our understanding the physical world, our culture, having systematically erased ancient wisdom, has regressed in terms of our lack of spiritual technologies to a point where many feel beyond help. He ends the first book calling for some sort of archaic revival.

His second book picks up with the notion of how the acceleration of time that we are currently experiencing correlates to the tightness of the spiral's coil at the end of a gyre; in his consideration of theories of Mayan end-time and the return of Quetzalcoatl, Pinchbeck examines the mysteries of psychic phenomena and crop circles, stories of gnomes and alien abductions. It made me wonder at the structures of the human mind, the creative nature of our existence. Especially at the book's close, Pinchbeck references the Hopi and their conception of cosmic time, which agrees with the Mayan claim that we are currently reaching the end of a world in a series of worlds; as for Yeats, the end of each historic age contains the seed for the character of the next. But while I read, I thought of the Hopi's labyrinth, which, from my understanding, they saw as both a symbol of the earth and as the individual's life; as Hesse wrote, "a journey to himself". But on the Hopi path, though there are twists and turns, there are no wrong paths -- perserverence will lead to the center. And as Pinchbeck's voice transformed from that of a spiritual wanderer to that of an oracle, I wondered if the Hopi metaphor was accurate: was Pinchbeck's prophetic channeling of a Mayan deity simply part of his spiritual path, which will make sense in the context of hindsight or could he be wandering down a solipsistic path to mental illness -- had he taken a "wrong turn"?

Last week my sister and I went to see "Pan's Labyrinth", which was the most beautiful film I saw this year with the possible exception of "The Fountain" (which I never wrote about in this forum, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, especially as it resonated with many themes in Pinchbeck's books, which I was reading at the time). Even if you haven't seen "El Laberinto Del Fauno", you've probably heard its conceit -- to escape an unpleasant reality (living with a sadistic Fascist officer in 1944 Spain), a little girl descends deeper and deeper into a world of fantasy in which she is an incarnation of an underworld princess [I hate spoilers -- everything I've just said is revealed in the film's first five minutes]. Dark and moving, the film's central theme is the tension between fantasy and reality. Despite a small Twilight Zonesque detail at the film's end along the lines of "So it was all a dream... or was it?", the director leaves it up to the audience to decide what is real, as I feel it should. And as Funkadelic sings, "fantasy is reality in the world today."

Yesterday, we wandered over to the Brooklyn Museum and snuck in even though it was free for the first Saturday of the month. Why?, you might ask. I am unsure, but for whatever reason the authorities were herding the public into a labyrinthine crowd control device, and I'd be damned before I'd submit to such madness. We emerged from the elevator to find the theme of the day was the subversion of reality's boundaries. We entered the Ron Mueck exhibition (incredibly lifelike sculptures of the human form in preposterous scales (massive and tiny) of silicone and fiberglass by a former Jim Henson Studios effects man) where there was some sort of "happening" going on. Barefoot women in white cotton dresses circumabulated slowly, occasionally ringing bells. Rogue accordianists peeped dissonance atonally. "Fakes" (actual people) posed sculpturally in spaces where Mueck's bizarre simulacra were absent. The flesh-and-blood posing as sculptures ("she almost looks real!") and the sculptures that looked all-too-human was not the end of the tunnel, though.

On the second floor, Devorah Sperber's rendition of Da Vinci's Last Supper is, in my opinion, a master work in illustrating the grey areas in reality perception. Composed of over 20,000 spools of thread, themselves threaded on wires hanging from the ceiling, Sperber has created an upside-down pixellated version of the fresco; when viewed through a spherical lens, not only does the work acheive a remarkable three-dimensional effect, but its clarity is breathtaking. One can clearly see details in the image that are not actually "there" in the pixels. Sperber writes that her work has to do with "how the human brain makes sense of the visual world"; due to our familiarity with the original, we unconsiously fill in missing visual information to make our perceptions match the way it "should look". If you live nearby -- forgo the link for the full effect of the work in person. I found her website to be interesting, but to gaze at the image through the lens, which not only flips and clarifies the image (like the lenses in the human eye) but distorts it and allows the viewer's brain to "paint" in the details, is amazing.

In light of understanding the creative element in reality-perception, I'd like to end with a story that's related on an interesting website of crop circle hoaxers. Some of the circles that these fellows make are astounding, but, from my understanding, many of the most impressive ones share features that the definitively manmade structures lack. Regardless, the creators of the crop formations are, in my mind, artistic geniuses, both of design and execution. The site's author questions the divide between the subjects of artistic and scientific inquiry. The following is a quote:

I have always thought it a wonderful irony that America's Budd Hopkins, the ufologist who is arguably the chief patron of the art-form known as the UFO abduction story, is by training and profession an artist. Would that he could apply his artist's insight to the tales of his abductees, which as a ufologist he takes to be literally true. As an artist, he once recounted a gentle parable about the human impulse to confuse the products of the mind with exogenous experience and revelation: 'A kindergarten teacher asked the children in her class to paint whatever they wished. Later, she enquired of each child what subject he or she was painting. A picture of Mommy or my cat were typical answers. One child, however, said "I'm painting a picture of God." How can you paint God? the teacher asked. "No one knows what God looks like." "Wait till I finish my painting," the child replied.'

Jesus Had No Jury

2007-01-22T14:41:00.000-05:00

I'm writing live and direct from the Brooklyn Criminal Court downtown, where I'm legally skipping school as I've been chosen to serve my fair city as a potential juror. Except I haven't been chosen for anything yet, so I'm sitting here dicking around on the computer. So far, the highlight of my day (aside from my 90 minute lunch break at The Brazen Head where I had some delicious brews & BBQ delivery) was a hilarious informational film entitled Your Turn: Jural Service in New York State that they showed us at the very beginning of the day. I walked in while they were demonstrating the medieval "trial by ordeal", by attempting to drown an alleged witch. Ed Bradley spoke to us (from beyond the grave, eerily enough) about the responsibility of living in a democracy. Images of Greek statuary accompanied his narrative about Aristotelian ethics. But then, the Romans abolished juries, and immediately, Jesus gets led away, hands bound, to the crucifiction. Pretty hilarious. This was followed by another religious image of a saint being martyred. I guess these qualify as Western history, but I think that if I were Hindu or something, I'd find the Christian symbolism out of place in the halls of a secular government...

Biked over here with frozen knuckles -- I guess winter finally came. A far cry from my bike ride two weeks ago, on a 70 degree Sunday, relaxing on the Brighton Beach boardwalk with delicious pastries, watching maniacs kitesurf, getting 10+ feet of air over the icy North Atlantic waters. But on the plus side, got to take some ski runs this weekend in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania...

Ooh! They just made an announcement that they're giving away NYS Jury System datebooks and calendars. Gotta run.

The A/S Paradox

2007-01-17T23:44:00.000-05:00

One beautiful thing about life is the way that being able to see both sides of a philosophical question reveals the beauty of a Zen koan. Currently, I'm awash in what might be called "synchronicities"; if you are unfamiliar with Jung's term, it refers to a coincidence, or often a series of coincidences, which have an inexplicable internal logic. One good one from today:

I was thinking about a crazy street art religious project I ran into over the holidays: a broom was laid in the middle of a busy sidewalk, perfectly aligned with the stone squares. Near the base was a small sign that read "Leviticus 7". A few blocks later, I came across a second installation, where a umbrella was bent into a backwards 7 with a plastic water jug over its handle. An identical sign was next to it. I had put the whole thing on the backburner of my mind. Today, for whatever reason, I thought of the incident and checked out the passage. Turned out to be fairly standard Leviticus -- the instructions on how to perform a sacrifice properly.

I was messing around on the Internet when I came across this spooky/funny old Sesame Street bit about a number painter. I had just watched the one where he's painting the number 7 when I realized that the first video under "director videos" in the right hand column (which typically have nothing to do with the video you're watching) was for a film preview of some film called "Lucky Number S7even". I thought that was kind of funny, so I watched it. Turns out that the film is largely about apparent coincidences that turn out to be something more. Thought I'd post about it, and realized that the date is 1/17/07. Aside from having two sevens in it, the date numerologically adds up to seven (1+1+7+0+7=16 1+6=7). The date of my previous post was 1/7/07. I'm 27. Last night I met a guy who's 37. He said that the two of us were "the sevens".

Traditionally, seven is thought to be lucky in Western culture, probably going back to at least the story of Creation in Genesis. Seven symbolizes the union of male (3) and female (4); it can thus be seen as a hierogamy (sacred marriage of heaven and earth). In the ancient world, there were seven wonders, seven sisters, seven celestial "wanderers" (the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), and the seven notes on the diatonic musical scale. The Christians have their seven virtues and their deadly sins, and the Great Beast has seven heads. The Japanese have seven lucky gods, Snow White is rescued by the seven dwarves. and who could forget "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers"?

Skeptics think that the perception of syncronicity is a function of the will to believe, a symptom of apophenia, or seeing connections in random data. Was my series of sevens today merely a perceived connection between meaningless phenomena? Did my consciousness simply tune out "noise" to pick up an arbitrary "signal"? Shamanic traditions and New Age neo-Jungians agree that synchronicities appear as alarm clocks and signposts -- to rouse a slumbering consciousness and indicate when changes can occur. Is this belief simply a mechanism to occasionally pay mind to the possibility of change, thus self-fulfilling the prophetic belief in synchronicity, a feedback cycle of reinforcement? Or are there patterns in the dynamics of the cosmos which simultaneously organize physical and psychic worlds, thus accounting for the acausal connections? As above, so below.

The Global Consciousness Project uses random-number generators (RNGs) in a method first developed at Princeton to test for possible interactions of consciousness with unrelated physical systems. The output of these RNGs is sent to a central computer which analyzes the statistical resonance and varience of the data. The researchers are looking to see if the focused psychic energies of a large number of individuals (mostly due to a televised event such as sports contests or awards ceremonies) affect the randomness of the data produced by RNGs. Interestingly enough, the results of these studies suggest that the data produced by the RNGs is significantly more coherent (less random) during those times of mass focused attention. Supposedly the biggest spike of global coherence was while the world watched the events of 9/11 unfold on live television and, perhaps most fascinating, the coherence patterns began to rise hours before the event ever happened, implying some reverse causality. If you're interested in a possible physical explanation about future events influencing the past (and you like the double-slit experiment, quantum mechanics' answer to the koan), I refer you to the delayed choice experiment, my brain candy for the month.

One last funny apophenic/synchronous story for the night. This evening, I tried to go to an event at the gallery where my sister works. An artist they represent has published his project, "An Illustration For Every Page of Gravity's Rainbow", and they were hosting a signing. On the way I picked up a copy of The Onion. It had an interview with the artist. I was under the impression that the event ran from 8 to 10. Around 8:30, I was at the closest subway stop to the gallery, when i decided to stop in Boston Market. I hadn't been to a Boston Market for years, and I had a craving for cornbread. I ate, then walked over to the gallery. It was about 9 by then, and the gallery was dark and closed. I called my sister. She had just gotten home -- the event ended at 8. She said she had been at the gallery until about 8:30, when she walked to the subway station. She saw the Boston Market, thought to herself that she hadn't been to a Boston Market in years, and had a craving for cornbread. She must have left the restaurant just as I was walking in. How bizarre that the first time that either of us had ever gone into this establishment (which I would probably frequent regularly if it were next to my subway stop) must have been within minutes of each other, drawn by some urgent craving. Or maybe not. I like to think that, just like the particle-wave duality, or the one-hand clapping, or any other paradox, it's neither-nor as well as both-and.

sadfunny

2007-01-07T23:15:00.000-05:00

Whenever I've told stories about my school, inevitably, some story comes up about something that happened in school that my teacher friends and I find hilarious, but others who may work outside of education or have "values" find saddening; often in the retelling of these stories, I realize their pathos. This essay may be such a case. Despite my best efforts to procrastinate, in order to maintain a sense of professionalism, tomorrow morning I have to conference with this student about this essay. Read it to the end and I guarantee it will have you laughing. Or crying. Or crying with laughter. I pulled a muscle in my neck the other night during a recitation. Without further ado ,,,

[Editor's note: I left all misspellings and capitatlization mistakes as they appeared in the original, but followed typographic protocol. Where the author inserted a long break between two words with no punctuation, I offset by three spaces. I chose not to attempt and approximate the author's decision to insert a space between the sentence's final word and the period, but I kept it before the comma-ellipsis because I thought it was really cool.]

Simple machine

... Forces and Friction are really heavy The simple machine of pushes is when people the wind pushes them o lot. Balanced Forsess and unbalanced forces Prouduce motion. machines, Work=, Force x Distance the force has olot of energy and its strong the Force and energy that it haves. simple machince energy kinetic\ Gravity Velocity, Kinetic Gravity is like a simple m.Compound machine is a good and simple machine. Simple machine are perfect because you could study olot of that. the thing that I learned that force is very heavy and that there are a lot of kind Simple machines that what I learned. I like and study a lot. at the places the Force is a kind of energy that pushes the people back puts it Force. the most important thing is that gravity is very dangerous because it haves o lot perfect things and dangerous and that why energy tick is very dangerous I like when teachers of science are teaching and I am taking notes because its more interested that the take and I am taking perfect and exited notes I felt very happy for taking the most important notetaking in the school or at the house because at the house people can read out loud and thats what works machines are very noicy and very incredible at all times because having a treat for or from simple machine that are noicy and exited so thats what simple machines are big for a thousands of people that whant them the simple machines are Just perfect for me well I am going to draw something from the Simple machine here it is the most beutifull thing ever that science thought me well ,,,

[Here the author drew an almost perfect rendering of a force diagram from a piece she wrote about the forces on a dogsled, except the dogs or "woulf"s are facing the sled, and it appears that "people", not friction is pushing in the opposite direction of the woulfs. I'll try to scan it so you can see the ornateness of the author's handwriting.]

the simple machines is a thing that has alot of stuf that is the thing that Mr. Stine Showed me of Scianse ! ! !

Damn the Man!

2006-12-28T11:08:00.000-05:00

You know, the Man has been responsible for so many atrocities around the world, from sponsoring the Pinochet death squads to depriving television audiences of even the glimmer of hope in seeing Janet Jackson's breast, but this may be the most depraved. When you attempt to view my blog through the NYC Department of Ed proxy, the following error message comes up:

I assume it's because of the "Panda Porn" posted in August from the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Center. Well, evidently we can add "not caring about adorable baby panda cubs" to the list of the Man's faults, defects, and shortcomings, because, as anyone who follows the struggle to breed the world's least sexually active mammal is wholly aware, panda porn is the greatest thing to happen to the baby panda population since sliced bamboo (Click here for more on this breaking story!)

It all just makes me want to go create an enormous effigy of Him in the Nevada desert and burn it. Hmmm...

Resolving the "Primitive" and Eschatological Concepts of Time Through Ritualistic Inebriation (Io Saturnalia & Merry Christmas)

2006-12-25T10:24:00.000-05:00

Last week I enjoyed the type of entertainment that can only be bought in blood, but before the more sensitive constitutions blanch at my words, imagining my delight at cockfighting or worse, allow me to explain. For nine consecutive nights, besting my Maccabean forebears by one, I caroused and reveled, toasting friends old and new; I indulged in delicacies at a gourmet feast around a roughly-hewn candle-lit table, I dipped anchovy-encrusted pizza in blue cheese dressing; I sang karaoke ‘til five in the morn, and danced my ass off at the school’s holiday party. For a week, I crawled into work bleary-eyed and unbathed and, to their credit, my colleagues, my students, and my family said not a word. Why no concern at my apparent descent into hedonism? Has young Stein finally accepted Bukowski’s crown of thorns, the aesthetic life above any moral prerogative? No, my detractors’ catcalls notwithstanding, I see myself as but a seasonal sot, a December drunkard. I blame the ancient Romans.

Now those in my inner circle may object, recalling my use of ancient Rome as the scapegoat of any number of problems, from global catastrophes to personal shortcomings, and I in turn bite my thumb at them. I still maintain that, if not for that accursed civilization, my students would be endowed with normative cognitive functions and I would be King of the Jews. But that’s besides the point. How could these people be responsible for my annual attempts to sabotage my good standing in the community by staggering about in bedraggled delirium systematically induced via nightly intoxication and sleep-deprivation? In a word, Saturnalia.

In Cosmos & History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade writes of the “primitive” belief in cyclic time, that, from the macro- to the microcosmic, all things wax and wane like the lunar phases, like the vegetal world. This belief in periodic regeneration is the basis for the New Year celebrations found in cultures from hunter-gatherer tribes to the great civilizations of antiquity. Despite our contemporary cult of progress, we retain cultural vestiges of this belief today. Consider our symbology for the dawning (another cyclic event) of the New Year – the old shrouded man, carrying a sickle and an hourglass (all symbols of our fragile mortality), transforms to a shining baby, a beautiful symbol of the restorative properties of time. Out of death rises life; out of entropic dissolution, the world is created anew.

Even before the Hellenistic influence associated Saturn with Kronos, father of Zeus, lord of the Titans who, interestingly enough, became known as the god of time, the Romans celebrated their agricultural god with Saturnalia, a week of bacchanalia beginning December 17. Similar to the Babylonian New Years rituals, law was suspended or even reversed. Masters served slaves, sexual mores were trumped, and, as you might imagine, there was a lot of drinking involved. In some periods, a mock emperor was installed, whose drunken proclamations were made law. Historians believe that this week-long party in ancient Rome survives in Carnival. I know it survives in Brooklyn.

It sounds to me like this party has the potential to get out of hand, especially with the acclaimed “reversal of fortunes” – an opportunity rife for exploitation by the socially marginalized – a slave rebellion. How did the party end? With the execution of the mock emperor, all masters reassumed their positions of power by whatever means necessary. Out of chaos, order is restored, whether through violence or coercion. By ritualistically allowing the populace to releasing latent tensions for a week each year, one might argue, it makes for better control. I imagine that during that week of chaotic excess, there are moments in which one sees the need for order, and though it’s eminently enjoyable, there’s a sense of relief as it winds to a close.

And so it goes. Last night, the date we post-pagans know as Christmas Eve, marks the traditional end of Saturnalia, and it found my family together nodding out on the couch in front of television’s warming glow after an evening of board games and cookie baking. I’m sure it is no coincidence that the early Christians, living in the Roman Empire, placed the celebration of the birth of their Lord at the end of Saturnalia. It allowed new converts to participate in the shared experience of dissolving social, moral, and cosmic boundaries, but, following Saturnalia’s dying throes, mopping up the bacchanalian aftermath, their holiday installed a new order, a shining baby to forgive the sins of mortality and the promise of eternal life, an escape from the cosmic cycle.

As for me, I prefer the model of cyclic time. Next week I’ll make my resolutions in an attempt to maintain the order that I feel here by the familial hearth, but, assuming the future resembles the past and that my resolve dissolves ere the crocuses bloom, I can always atone come Yom Kippur. Bless the cultural remains of “primitive” wisdom.

Low Maintenance Nurturing

2006-12-08T22:56:00.000-05:00

I like having plants and making beer. They're good hobbies for a procrastinator, because they're living things that require some semblence of nurturing, after which they will grow and do amazing things (like get you drunk), but you don't need to feed them every day, and they don't have faces, so if something goes wrong, you feel bad, but not that bad. I'm very conscious right now of my psychic relationship with all of the plants in the room, and I'm trying to reassure them, "not you!", but they know.

Freaky Mutations

2006-12-08T21:41:00.000-05:00

You know what was a freaky mutation? When dinosaurs started growing feathers. Weird. But don't think that I have anything against our flying friends. Even though I was visibly disturbed by a showing of Hitchcock's The Birds last weekend, I think I was more frightened at the realization of how deranged he was when he created the piece than by his "what if?" of nature conspiring against us. Is my implicit trust in nature's blindness over my trust in the psyche a personal whim or a mark of our era? Anyway, I think it's pretty obvious how freakishly cool feathers are -- made of a flexible form keratin, the same superstrong protein that helps make up our hair and nails, as well as rhino horns and fish scales -- feathers emerge from the skin as elongated hollow barbs. From each of these hollow stems grows plumage, a branching pattern of tubes so densely clustered that they fill a two dimensional space. It's like always wearing a lightweight streamlined waterproof down jacket (can we even make one of those?) Have I mentioned that each of these tubes is hollow, down to the micro level? That, though they can be generalized into two major groups, contour and downy, each feather is specialized and that a bird can turn by tilting only a few contour feathers? Amazing.

November is National Talk Like A Robot Month

2006-11-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

I don't know what the parties that you host in your dreams are like, but speaking for myself, the guest list generally includes a strange mix of people from all parts of my life -- sexy female friends fraternize with my embarrassing older relatives; my pre-adolescent students smoke and booze with college party animals. The mix generally provokes an entire range of emotions, but the feeling I am generally left with upon awakening is a strange sleepy sense of contentment -- I'm happy to know such a diverse crowd and I'm pleased that their juxtaposition has worked so bizarrely well.

Similarly, my November has been host to a pastiche of conditions, whether considered meteorologically, intellectually, or emotionally. Over this past month, New York has been bombarded with unseasonable highs and lows, icy downpours, weeks of slow drizzle, crisp clear photon-filled afternoons, and evenings composed of delicious other-worldly fogs. I have been voraciously ripping through short written works, devouring the casework of Sherlock Holmes, the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, the memoirs of Harpo Marx, the magic of Angela Carter, the speculations of William Gibson and Robert Anton Wilson, and the incompatible
nihilisms of Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis (both of which I read as an impressionable high school freshman; the former remains, in my opinion, a writer of considerable imagination, talent, and wit; the latter remains devoid of these characteristics).

As a result, I've been of many minds as to my future -- I have many goals for the next few years -- which to pursue, and in which order? I had my mind fairly made up to leave my school at the end of the year and to pursue a six-month trip overland in Asia or South or Central America -- now I wonder if that fits in with my other pursuits -- my thirsts for community, for further education, for closeness with family and friends, for love, for excitement, for comfort, for joy and for contentment. I have a feeling that, improbable as it may seem, like a puzzle of sliding pieces and metal rings, I can separate these priorities and still manage to fit them together again.

And, at 27, I feel that I can only marvel at the experiences I've had, and give thanks to the unknowable machinations of the cosmos, for all of the wonderful people who make my life a joy (especially those who've been asking me when my next blog post was going up -- I write in my journal, but it's better practice to have an audience); for the Brooklyn community of which I've been lucky to be a part; for the always challenging, entertaining, and humbling role of being a middle school teacher in the ghetto; for the endless beauty that I bask in and dance through every day; and, too, for my many loves, I am grateful.

Some highlights of my month:

- an awesome Halloween where I got mad props for my costume (a saddhu for a friend's party, and as the Mystery Man from "Cosmik Debris" for Zappa Plays Zappa at MSG (photos forthcoming)

- going to see tons of art, some of it mind-meltingly good, between the DUMBO Underground Arts Festival, the Gowanus Open Studios, and the Vollard exhibition at the Met

- the midterm elections -- yay!

- fort-building and pillowfights in Baltimore

- running about a fifth of the NYC Marathon with the lovely Geertz sisters

- a fun party at my house which, though not as diverse as my dream parties, hosted a good mix of characters, where homebrew and an enormous bin full of commercial beer on ice entertained us despite the cloud cover shielding us from marveling at the Leonid meteor shower

- the cover story on Saturn in the new issue of National Geographic with amazing photos from Cassini of the planet and its moons including info on the possiblities of life in the orange smog of Titan or beneath the in the warm subterranean oceans below the icy surface of Enceledus

- a great Thanksgiving in Arizona, where I got to go on a couple of really fun hikes, enjoy some great food, go dancing at an enormous kindof cheesy club with a good band, get set up on a blind date which my entire family attended, and in general, enjoy good times with the fam

- last night, having a funny cab driver named Steve Buschemi coming home from JFK in the wee hours

- and this one night of delicious mists that stood outside of time --

I was spellbound, mid-stride, on the cracked and wet stone slabs that compose the broad sidewalks of Park Slope's side streets, frozen by some imperceptible breeze that caused the yellow leaves of a slender ash to shimmer in and out of existence; between the shadows and the streetlamp's glow, they fell like rain. Later, in the park itself, the sky hung above me like the glowing contents of an inverted cauldron as I stood in a darkened field surrounded by a ring of orange streetlamps which, doubly filtered through the misty night and my fogged lenses, appeared to be distant nebulae, the limits of the observable universe, around which white headlights whirled, the turning of the wheel...

I hope the season finds you well. Le me know by clicking the comment button below. I promise not to let my responsibility as blogger slip so precipitously again...

Autumn In New York

2006-10-02T13:33:00.000-04:00

Today is glorious: the air has a crisp chill, a regata of puffy clouds drift across a robin's egg blue sky, and the resplendant golden light warms the skin and illuminates every leaf, quivering in the slight breeze. The coves of Larchmont's harbor were a rich blue, glittering with the mottles of sunlight, between smooth glassy stretches of still mirror-likewater. I am in my childhood home for Yom Kippur, the culmination of the Jewish high holy days, ten days of annual reflection on our moral and our mortal natures, a day marked by fasting and meditation. It is today that observant Jews self-inflict suffering to bring themselves closer to an awareness of their mortality, and reflect their failures to realize their potential for greatness to inspire another year of striving to live the good life. In a few hours, we will have friends and family over for a bit of a feast, the break-fast, where I will indulge myself with all types of Jewish goodies, from bagels and lox to wine to my momma's noodle kugel in an orgiastic celebration of choosing life (well, orgiastic for Judaism anyway), but for now I'm just hungry.

But rather than subject my readers to a rehashing of my personal shortcomings or a musing on the limited time we have to enjoy life (though, if you would indulge me, I do love the following line from Gates of Repentance, my synogogue's chosen siddur for the holiday: "We are each a shattered urn, grass that will wither, a flower that soon fades, a speck of dust floating, a dream soon forgotten"), or to go on about the awesome technology convention that I took my classes to this week, or the Torquemada-esque priest who presided over my cousin's wedding on Saturday, or to relate a story of animatronic panda stuffed animals singing and dancing inside of Thai girls's clothing that must be told soon, I just want to recall walking to my parents's house from the train station at 2 AM Friday night, after a decadent night of tacos and beer, chocolate fondue and 20-year tawny port, barely catching the last train to Westchester, and walking down the hill in front of the Manyons's old house (which I used to be afraid to ride down with my bike), stepping into a pool of darkness between the orange territories of the suburban streetlamps, and looking up to see that majestic hunter, Orion, rising into the interstellar blackness of a cool night sky, driving out the summer's heat and frivolity, an earnest beacon of strength emerging out of the chaos and disorder to mark a new season, a new age. Sure, in a few months, we will be chummy, Orion and I, and he will again be a familiar sight, a landmark in the winter sky, guarding us through the frost until he is chased away by the Scorpion of watery thaw. But Friday night I was taken aback to see him, and he, moreso than my neighbors reprimanding me for not wearing a jacket, even moreso than the WBGO DJs playing Billie Holiday, he was a herald for the new day, and I stood, shivering slightly, gazing out at these nuclear explosions across unfathomable distances, and I knew that I need no castles in Spain, it was good to live it again.

The flickering lights

2006-09-20T23:46:00.000-04:00

The other night my friend Bonnie challenged me to justify my choice of New York as my home. More than most other native denizens, I have tasted the fruits of other cities, other settings, and have chosen to return here. True, the comfort of having family and friends close by has proven significant in my weighing of options, but, I said, there is something else: an ineffable character in New York's streets, is brownstones, its waterfronts, an energy present nowhere else. Her reply completely ignored my off-guard grasping at straws -- how could the anyone who can afford to live here have time to benefit from the inspiration, this "energy", and produce art? My stoop is occupied by older Carribbean alcoholics who can no longer afford the rents of this gentrifying neighborhood and the materials of their art are cheap enough, at $5 a six-pack -- what chance do the welders, the photographers, the glass sculptors have? I hear the desperate mice behind my bookshelf, chewing on tablets of Pepto-Bismol. Sad.

And as, while we sleep, the stars, exploding Roman candles that illuminate distant worlds, so eager to live that their light, created only via their own destruction, struggles to emerge and flicker through the midnight blue that fills the space between the acid orange halos of the streetlamp's excited gases, we urban-dwellers, children of the Apple, revel in the drops of sweet nectar that descend to our lips through the monotony and the filth; I struggle through conversations with painfully stylish women with whom I share nothing but a seat on the subway; I endure seasons of blind bureaucracy for the sweet months of summer freedom; I withstand weeks of abuse from adolecents for the brilliance of God's gift to the worker ants -- the weekend.

For a well-spent weekend in New York really is justification enough, a sweet carrot to make one forget the sticks wielded by our resident tyrants, from the developers to the homeless. To emerge from the subway at Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island on a beautiful Indian summer Saturday, en route to a seaside game of miniature golf, and to be confronted with this incredibly beautiful and sad mural from another planet, awestruck for the better part of half an hour, speechlessly pouring over the dumpster loads of imagination that poured through the nozzles of spray paint cans, pointing at the dreamscape detail of a fantasy nightmare portrayed in exacting detail, we were shaken from our contemplative solace by the bellowing of an older woman, head wrapped like a Russian peasant, wheeling a shopping cart full of indiscernable rubbish, yelling "BLAA!" -- well, that folks, that right there is worth a kingly ransom in rent. So, I guess live here for the crazies.

God Bless 'Merica

2006-09-12T22:51:00.000-04:00

2 AM Saturday, I found myself stumbling about the glass and steel canyons of lower Manhattan, when I looked up to behold a perfectly vertical shaft of pure white light uniting the earth and the heavens. This light seized me, transporting me back in time. I was abroad for 9/11 and for nearly a year thereafter; the events surrounding that time have always remained somewhat of an abstraction for me. To tell you the truth, I don't even really remember the towers all that well. Despite being born and raised in the immediate vicinity of New York's orange glow, the World Trade Center has taken on more significance in its absence -- this is where you could have seen the twin buildings looming over the harbor from my rooftop, that is the eerie shudder I get from feeling the thousands of ghosts flutter about Ground Zero (or, as it's been renamed, the "9/11 Memorial Hole"). But, I think, most poignantly, there were the "Towers of Light", two groups of massive spotlights shining from near the footprint of the original towers, forming a sort of Jacob's Ladder, two luminous parallel pathways, a dual proclamation: we remember, but life must go on.

9:03 AM yesterday, to mark the fifth anniversary of that morning, the second plane that everybody else saw live on television -- that day I, in the mountains of India, feared I might never be able to go home again, the first time I'd seriously considered an external threat to our homeland since the death of the Commie bogeyman -- our arch-patriot of an assistant principal, he who doggedly includes the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, Supreme Court be damned, went on a mini-tirade over the public address system about how this date must never be forgotten, not only for all of the innocent blood shed on that date, for all of the heroic emergency personnel who gave their lives trying to rescue those trapped in the towers, and for all of the volunteers who are now sick from their tireless hours spent looking for survivors, but also for the soldiers who've been sacrificed in the fight against "the enemies of this country". I felt sick myself. I don't mean to to use this blog as a soapbox, but to conflate a 9/11 memorial with justifying America's war in Iraq equivocates jihadists and insurgents, whom, if if both groups of militant Sunnis, remain strange bedfellows, united by misery. After the shortest "moment of silence" I've ever observed, we were led in a rousing rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, and I stood dumbfounded by the spectacle of my bilingual students, many of whom could not piece together a basic English sentence, mimicking a pledge they most definitely can not understand.

But tonight, coming home after dark from what all agreed was a pointless Open House (a week into school, we don't have a whole lot to say to the parents, and they certainly didn't have a lot of questions for us), I stopped by my local polling place for the Democratic primary, and I was filled with genuine love for my country. People of all ages, creeds and colors filled the brightly lit gymnasium of the local elementary school. On one line, a young Caribbean woman with a baby in a stroller sporting a Marcus Garvey T-shirt waited behind a white lesbian couple and a few men with full beards and Muslim skullcaps. It's a fairly important primary for local politics, as it will probably decide the winner of the Congressional seat that's opening due to our Representative's retirement. And, just to see the people out -- the single moms, the old folks with missing teeth, the businessman in a tailored suit with a walrus mustache and the guy in a pinstriped sportscoat whose unbuttoned shirt revealed a purplish chest and belly covered in fine white hairs -- to see these people and to realize that, despite the Halliburtons and the undying agribusiness subsidies, perhaps the people who make our laws are flawed because they reflect us, well, it made me happy.

As I walked out into the Brooklyn streets, I walked down the sidewalk with an older Bengali gentleman, trying not to picture the 17 skyscrapers that are probably going to be built and turn our neighborhood into Tokyo (according to the Wikipedia entry, if built according to plan, the proposed development will be the most densely populated area in North America). Some teenagers played basketball in the darkened schoolyard by the lights of the orange streetlamps half a block away. An enormous cream-colored tourbus was parked on our corner (across from a rehearsal space that opened last year) and a few guys (who turned out to be in the band Citizen Cope, celebrating the release of their new album and about to go on a national tour) were smoking cigarettes and drinking out of plastic cups. I wanted to stop a minute and talk to them, but my Muslim neighbor was on his way home, so, before parting ways, I asked him what he thought of the election. "It's good," he said, "but too many vote." I guess that says it. If less people voted, maybe some of the candidates I liked would have won -- I guess that's democracy.

Oh, and happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! (30 years!)

2006-09-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

I woke early this morning, the first Saturday of the new school year, to the rising sun streaming through my curtain, its orange warmth evoking Monday morning when I danced through the streets of Crown Heights in the first rays of a new day's sun amidst a crowd of revelers, the air a redolent melange of sweet vanilla blunt smoke and talcum powder, swirling about a streaming parade of percussion -- floats of silver spangles with steelpan orchestras, 30 drummers deep; Con Ed workers banging on huge chunks of metal hanging from around their necks; people of all ages marching with snares, blowing on whistles, banging on cowbells and woodblocks. It was J'ouvert (a Creole contraction for jour ouvert -- day opens), the street party which bridges the witching hour to the morning of the peak of Caribbean Carnivals from Trinidad to Brooklyn -- on Labor Day and drawing a couple of million people annually, ours is the last and the largest of the season, and the fervency of its celebration, between the chanting and the drumming and the dancing, the public drinking and drunkenness, the paint-covered people wandering the streets like zombies looking for others to initiate into their brotherhood, the elaborate costumes of sequins and feathers (as well as the African royals and the manikins and the big booty babysitter above), and the baby powder being squirted everywhere, this is my consolation that, yet again, I didn't get to go to Burning Man this year.

And, though I didn't bring my camera, here's some photos that I downloaded from a steelpan websiteto give you all a sense for the craziness. The amazing thing is, despite the massiveness of the actual carnival, I recognize almost all of the subjects of these photos -- at 3:30 am there was only one float running, a Trini steelpan group with their supporters in red, waving flags, smearing red paint on faces, arms, shirts (my companion and I got pretty well worked over); soon thereafter a couple of groups from Grenada got it together and took over with drums and whistles, and the night unfolded from there. Got home by 8, and got a couple of hours of shuteye before a fantastic barbecue on my friend Sol's rooftop (overlooking Eastern Parkway and the parade route, we were subjected to hours of eating delicious food) put an official end to my summer.

On that note, back in the classroom I've realized something about the nature of time -- when put in a steady routine, the days can drag, but the weeks sure fly by. Most of the other teachers I know who didn't go anywhere for the summer, whether working or relaxing, said it flew by. Those who split it up, enjoyed a variety of activities and locales, seem to have appreciated the time more. I can't believe 2% of the school year is already over -- I hope that this routine doesn't eat my precious, precious life... It's good to be back, but I think this is sizing up to be my last year -- the Department of Ed is slowly shutting down our school (Lord knows why -- I think that it's just gotten better and better over the few years I've been there) by giving us less and less students, which means decreased funding. Glad I'm not at the bottom of the totem pole, but I worry for some of my friends's jobs.

My ears are ringing from amazing concert last night (Comets on Fire -- psychedelic metal), my belly is full of yummy frenchtoast and eggs from my local greasy spoon (if you live in Brooklyn's 11th Congressional District and are a registered Democrat reading this before Tuesday, please vote for Chris Owens & Bill Batson in the primaries to fight the hyperdensity of the Atlantic Yards luxury development and keep places like Nick's open), and I think it's time to veg out for a bit and enjoy my Saturday afternoon. Just so long as that doesn't become routine.

Gee, It's Good To Be Back Home

2006-08-28T11:35:00.000-04:00

Though I miss the road life (even more that I'm actually back at school -- though I'd said that no amount of per-session money could drag me back into the building before my mandated return on the 31st, I actually was excited to set up my new classroom, which I just found out I will not be receiving this year due to administrative snafus. Crestfallen, I'm blogging on the department of education's dollar.), it has been pretty sweet to be back in Brooklyn. Granted, as I returned about a week before my sublettee had to move out, it's been a bit strange in the apartment (though I've been sleeping in my roommate's bed, as she's never around and her mattress is obscenely comfortable -- she doesn't know, but I don't think she reads my blog, so I feel safe divulging in this forum).

Sure, SoHo's boutiques don't have salesgirls standing on the sidewalks shouting at passersby and clapping enthusiastically, and it's hard to find a charcoal barbeque at three in the morning, but last night I got to indulge in a glass of California Cabernet while my friend James played bass for a spirited crew of soulful country musicians at The Living Room's "Honkey Tonk Happy Hour", then I walked a few blocks northeast to Esperanto, where my friend Ehud was playing accordian for a forro group, and I ate some excellent coconut tuna ceviche, and I wrapped up the night by dropping in on my friend Sol who was closing up at The Chocolate Room. It's hard enough to find decent chocolate in Asia, let alone entire establishments dedicated to its continual refinement and distribution. So, although my exploits this summer had made me consider maybe spending a year teaching in Asia, affording travels to Ladakh and Luzon, Malaysia and Mongolia, Shanghai and Xinjiang, the twin pleasures of being among my loved ones and my loved Western pleasure are making me reconsider...

Looking forward to celebrating my birthday with my folks tomorrow (who are just returning from a week in Paris to celebrate their 30th anniversary) at an amazing vegetarian Korean restaurant which is set up like a temple inside -- really beautiful and the food is stupendous -- and then some craft beers with friends at a nearby ale house. If you're in town, stop by the Waterfront Ale House on Second Ave at Thirtieth Street around nine... This weekend, Labor Day, brings the West Indian Day Carnival back to Brooklyn -- look forward to accounts of the incredible intoxicating all-night party known as Jouvet, which involves much public drinking and dancing, people throwing paint and baby powder each other, as the floats get set up with steel drums and blaring reggae in the streets of Crown Heights. It's amazing -- I'll try and take some pics this year, but most of the fun is in the predawn -- once the sun starts coming up, a sense of confusion starts to set in as people try and figure out if they're going to try and get a nap in before the (literally) millions of parade goers start to fill in the streets, or if they'll try and party straight through the parade. I've got a few liters of my best homebrew -- a Belgian abbey-style trippel that's been cold-conditioning for six months -- banking on my ability to continue into the day and get on my friends' rooftop overlooking Eastern Parkway. And the following morning is the real first day of school. I can't wait.

New Panda Porn Online

2006-08-23T05:57:00.000-04:00

Panda Breeding,
originally uploaded by steinyjb.

I hope no one in my readership is offended. I happen to think this is one of the funniest images I've ever seen (on a poster about the panda reproduction habits at the Giant Panda Breeding Center, Chengdu). If this doesn't generate some comments, I give up.

What I'm Going To Miss About China

2006-08-23T03:30:00.000-04:00

Well, I know I've got a week of living in Chengdu to fill y'all in on, but I'm not sure I'm up for it at the present. In synopsis, met a lot of travellers at a very cool hostel, did about one cultural thing per day [saw a few temples, the sichuan "opera" (more like a circus -- will get its own post with pics), & the giant panda breeding center (ditto -- saw the keepers beating a stubborn two-year old cub who wouldn't come inside)], ate a whole bunch of good food, both Sichuanese & Western (and ran into someone from high school at a great Tex-Mex joint on the south of town), and basically relaxed as I am all too aware that summer vacation '06 is drawing to a close. And although I find myself in the strange position of actually looking forward to the new school year (been having good teaching dreams for the first time ever & I'm going shopping for some new kicks today), I've been mentally compiling a list of things I'm going to miss next week. Here goes nothing:

出 routinely devouring delicious food at restaurants until stupefied for what stateside would amount to pocket change

出 being woken in the grey dawn by the street cleaning truck blaring a medley of Christmas songs

出 having children continually greet me with screams of "hello"

出 the cognitive dissonance that accompanies the sight of a beautiful woman openly picking her nose or hocking a loogie

出 the way everyone here runs like a girl

出 having my seatmate on the bus use my shoulder as a pillow

出 meeting hardcore travellers -- yesterday i met an Aussie girl who's been riding a motorcycle all up through the mountains; two years ago she kayaked 2,000 miles from Skagway, AK to Vancouver, BC

出 the excitement of trying to figure out what exactly it is that you're eating

出 late night barbecue -- charcoal grilled skewers of meats & veggies brushed with oils, chilis, and "flower spice" (illegal in the US, it makes your face tingle)

出 pantomiming any request that exceeds my basic vocabulary

出 long-distance travel being eminently affordable, especially to those of us lucky enough to earn yankeee dollars

出 having little to no real responsibility

But, it will be nice to get back home -- despite dreading the heat and humidity of the "dog days", I do miss my Brooklyn neighborhood, family, and friends, Mamoun's and the Cyclone, and look forward to the West Indian Day Carnival. I am currently in Kunming, "The City of Eternal Spring", where, true to form, it is very pretty, there are lots of flowers, and it is raining. Tomorrow night, Bangkok, for a last dosage of Asian hedonism; Friday, providing I don't miss my flight this year, the long journey home.

By the way, in case reading this blog is your first introduction to the world of blogging, feel free to comment on any of my posts by clicking the "comment" link highlighted below. If the future resembles the past, it probably says "0 comments", which somtimes makes me feel like these writings are an exercise in solipsism...

Sichuan: Good Times, Good Eats

2006-08-17T00:50:00.000-04:00

Just finished a delicious plate of spicy pig liver and mushrooms, the result of that reliable fallback, expressing "I'll have what they're having" through pantomime, and my play of charades made me think of you all, my silent readership. I know you're out there -- why don't you comment? Regardeless, time to share some stories and acquired wisdoms of the road. To wit, if an old Chinese lady offers to grate an unidentifiable gelatinous mass into flat gummy worm noodles and cover them with a variety of spicy sauces, though it may seem counter-intuitive, I say go along for the ride. It's been working out great for me.

Today's my second full day in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province, and though it is the bustling home to 10 million people, and, like practically everywhere I've been in China it is undergoing massive construction projects, it is actually quieter than Kangding, the Tibeto-Chinese mini-city that I just left. I'm not sure what possesses the drivers of Kangding to invest in the loudest horns possible and to lean on them whenever something moves in their field of vision, but it makes it so that the relentless sounds of traffic drown out the birdsong, even after hiking an hour up into the mountains between which Kangding is snugly nestled at the confluence of two rivers. Though I've been on the banks of much larger rivers this summer, and seen some seriously huge rapids, I'm not sure I've ever been in a city with a long stretch of Class 2 rapids right downtown. The horns notwithstanding, the physical and cultural geography of the area warrented a stay of a few days.

The trip to the alpine lake was very nice. With a multicultural crew culled from The Black Tent, the hostel around which Kangding's backpacker universe rotates, we assailed Muguecuo Lake with a minibus and Japanese dirt bikes. Actually, I assailed nothing with a dirt bike; as previously related, I can barely drive stickshift. But our crew contained two Americans (from Hawaii), who'd bought some badass motorcycles in Chengdu and were driving around Sichuan, unlicenced and unregistered, having a great time. When I met them on the streets of Kangding, they had about four bucks between the two of them, and no way to get more money for at least a couple of days. Funny dudes, yet I digress. The lake, about 11,000 ft. elevation, was a bit too cold for swimming, but we played in the sand on the beach and climbed up to a mountain pass, from where one would be able to see the majestic Gongga Shan (about 26,000 ft.) on a clear day. As it was grey and blustery, we huddled in a horse farmer's lean-to for a bit until, glory of glories, the sun came out. It just got better from there.

The Chinese girls that we were with asked if we wanted to wash our feet and eat some eggs. After a bit of back and forth, we determined that nothing was being misunderstood in translation, and decided as a group that footwashing and eggs sounded grand. We were a mite peckish anyway. We proceeded en masse to a bubbling hot spring, far too hot to submerge your feet in for any extended period of time (over 190 degrees F), but nice enough to sit around on the rocks, eating soft-boiled eggs (apparently cooked in the springs, they were very tasty, though, not knowing they were going to be soft inside, I got the first one all over my shorts). But, perhaps even more exciting, we stopped at another lake on the way home where they had excellent wild mushroom soup, and we got a clear view of Gongga's peak. To be honest, I guess because it was pretty far away (maybe 50 miles), it didn't look that big, especially in the pictures I took, but I knew that I was viewing one of the highest places on the planet. Next time, must return with camping gear to hike up close to the peak and its disappearing glaciers.

My other primary adventures concerned Paoma Shan, the mountain on the edge of town immortalized in a love song that I guess all Chinese people know, which I heard over and over again in my time in Kangding (most enjoyably put to an electronic beat, being danced to by a number of young women in white silk costumes with furry white mohawks improbably balanced on their heads, but I digress again). [a further musical digression -- the old woman watching television just put on Chinese Idol, or some other Chinese karaoke show, on which a tiny pretty Chinese girl was belting out "Killing Me Softly" with the soul of Roberta Flack. Bizarre.]

Anyway, the first time I tried to climb Paoma Shan, I began to climb the stone as the sun was going down behind the mountains across the valley. I figured that a couple of hours of dusky light would be enough to get up without a problem, but after reaching a pagoda with an amazing vantage point on the town (photo to come), I decided to descend, but by a different route. Travel wisdom #2: when time is pressing, don't start exploring new routes. I ended up at the locked back gate of a lamasery, which sat on a cliff about fifty feet above the roadway, in the twilight. Most of the wall was topped in shards of broken glass, but I found a part of the wall where the monks must climb out at night (I found a nearby clearing in the woods with armchairs and a table where they probably sit around, drinking beer, playing cards). I pulled myself up on the wall and yelled "Tashi Delek? Ni How? Hello?" for at least five minutes. I'm sure the lama heard me and decided not to come to my aid. What grandmotherly kindness. I ended up jumping the wall, dropping down into the lamasery, sneaking through the courtyard, and letting myself out the front door. When I finally got down onto the street, a crowd was watching me, doubtlessly having heard my calls for assistance, and probably having watched me break into the temple. Embarrassed, I ducked down a staircase, praying that it wouldn't dead-end in an apartment complex as most Chinese alley seem to do. Miraculously it let me out just across the river from my hostel. Then I saw them. Three ridiculously cute Chinese girls, all about five or six, closing in fast. They looked back and forth at each other, and then assaulted me with big smiles and "Hello!"s. I didn't know whether to laugh or run, and one of them, the ringleader of cute, asked me, "How do you like China?" "I love it!" I replied, gave them a grin and two thumbs up, and made a break for it, leaving them giggling.

My other adventure on Paoma Shan came the next day when, after eschewing the stairs for wooded trails and summiting in record time, I decided to forge my own path down the mountain. Sliding down a steep slope covered in thornbushes, I carefully rethought that decision. Finally I made my way back to the open woods, and, relieved, I decided to relieve myself. I had barely zipped up when I was startled by an old man with a white goatee in a grey sportscoat emerging from amongst the trees, carrying a crumpled white plastic shopping bag. I thought he was homeless, perhaps. I thought of how the Lonely Planet warned that a UK tourist was killed hiking alone on Paoma Shan five years ago (I hate it when they tell you stuff like that). The old man called out to me and I got in the sprinting stance. He was asking me something in Chinese; my apprehension grew. He slowly opened the bag; I expected it to be full of the severed shrunken heads of other backpacers so unwise to penetrate the backwoods of Paoma. Would there be a love song written about me? Would they set it to an awful house beat and dance to it for tourists in a cheesy Tibetan club? I don't know, but the bag was full of mushrooms -- foraging for wild fungus being a popular and delicious pastime in these parts. Sweet relief yet again (thank goodness my bladder was already void).

Photos are up!

2006-08-13T09:25:00.000-04:00

DSCN2709,
originally uploaded by steinyjb.

Alright -- finally posted a bunch of fotos to Flickr that I've been meaning to get up. Check them out when you've got a minute -- some from Laos, some snowcapped mountains, some Tibetan culture. Will organize them better when I'm home in Brooklyn and sadly reminiscing about the easy life. For now, there's Sichuanese food to be eaten...

Chilling in Kangding

2006-08-12T09:05:00.000-04:00

Arrived this afternoon in Kangding, a small city built on the banks of a raging river between steep and rocky slopes, after heading east for eight hours on the Sichuan-Tibet highway. The road crosses treeless passes, and I spent hours looking out the window without viewing any permanent human habitation, the grassy landscape periodically punctuated with the lumbering hairy black masses of yaks and the less hairy tents of their nomadic herdspeople. If you looked closely (and I had little else to do from my seat in the back of a bus following the road winding like the back of some mythological serpent) you could make out their nomads's steeds grazing on the alpine vegetation and, occasionally, a motorcycle, the steed of the modern age, that, barring further advancement in alternative energy, can only be sated with the fossilized energy of carbon-based life from eons past.

But I digress. Just wanted to punch in, say that I am now in a city where I can update photos, and that this should be done in the next day or two. Tomorrow, off to an alpine lake. The next day, maybe the disappearing glacier that should have a view of 26,000 ft. Gongga Shan. For those of you who are growing to resent my somewhat nomadic lifestyle (though I generally sleep under a roof, unlike the two motorcycling Americans I met this evening who are out of yuan, at least until the bank opens tomorrow), rest assured that the last couple of days I had a headache, possibly from the altitude, possibly from choosing a hotel in the hammering district (aside from the omnipresent construction, the metalworkers didn't stop last night until after midnight), and my time abroad is fast waning. I'll try to make the most of it.

From the Two Shangris-La to the Former Kingdom of Kham

2006-08-10T05:25:00.000-04:00

Alright! Back in civilization (though on the trail a few days ago, despite being hours from the nearest dirt road, my friend Laura would say that every time we spotted a ramshackle lean-to masquerading as a noodle shop), and able to update. Sorry for the long delay between posts, dear readers -- you have my solemn word that it will never happen again. Let's see, we last left off with our hero heading into mountains in search of physical exertion and spiritual inspiration. Safe to say, I found both in two spurts of "trekking" (a word we don't use much stateside, but in Asian backpacking it generally means hiking during the day and staying in trailside guesthouses at night -- tourists camping is uncommon out here, though the nomadic herdsmen have made a lifestyle out of it). Trek the first was through and beyond the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge; trek the second into the Meili Xueshan mountain range, quite possibly the most beautiful mountains I've ever seen, on the border between Yunnan & Xizang provinces [Note: though Xizang province is commonly referred to as "Tibet", northwest Yunnan and western Sichuan were historically, and remain culturally, Tibetan -- though I'm not paying for a permit into Xizang province, much of my month in China has and will be spent in Tibetan lands, though perhaps not "Tibet" as defined in the modern sense (and as the title of this posting indicates, this isn't the last time I'm going to quibble with place names)]. I feel bad that, due to technical difficulties, I can't get pictures up immediately, but by sometime next week, the beauty of Miacimu and the awesome grandeur of Kawa Karpo will grace this page. You have my word. For those who can't wait, there's always Google Images. Oh, and I warn, this post is fairly long. You might want to read part now and save some for later rather than get travelogue fatigue. Consider yourselves warned.

After a brief return to Mama's Naxi Family Guesthouse in the old city of Lijiang (highly recommended -- call 0888-8881012: they'll pick you up at the bus station, take you to their cute guesthouse on the back streets of the, at times, overwhelming old city, swarming with busloads of Chinese tourists, and stuff you full of good food at a nominal price. Mama packs you a lunch when you leave, and gives you a sachet of herbs for safe travels), I caught a bus to Qiaotou, trailhead for Tiger Leaping Gorge. For our longtime readers, I will try to go easy on the poetic wax as last summer I described the immensity of the gorge in detail, but, to quote Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys), an excellent (fictional) book on Scott's disasterous attempt at the South Pole, in this landscape "any man with eyes will see that he is as consequential as a raindrop in the ocean." Imagine five Manhattans composed in stone; reportedly 13,000 feet from the raging brown waters of the Yangtze to the craggy peaks looming impossibly high above; you hike a clear trail through farming villages directly across from 10,000 foot cliffs of black and orange; recent landslides leave exposed scars of pure white limestone beneath the weathering; older landslide scars are now colonized by tenacious trees, testament to life's ability to flourish in any foothold. I do have some pictures up on my flickr site, but even a wide-angle lens would find it impossible to frame the massiveness of the place within a viewfinder -- I have some collages in the works for when i get home and learn how to use Photoshop. For now, take my word for it -- like the Grand Canyon, it is one of those places that makes space visible and fills me with the vertigonous desire to dive deep, catch an updraft, and effortly glide the gorge's length, marveling at creation.

The first morning, staying at a sweet guesthouse in one of the aforementioned villages, I went to take a shower and found a massive spider guarding the spigot. No problem, I did't think it's poisonous, and I fully realized my relative size advantage. Nothing to be scared of. Yet, as I lathered up, I didn't take my eyes off of it, so I had a clear view of it scurrying across the shelf into my pile of clothes. I took my time enjoying the warm water (first hot shower since Dali), imagining it laying a cluster of eggs in my t-shirt, which would burst open at some point on the hike, inundating me with a swarm of ravenous babies... Finally the beast emerged from my rumpled clothing, and I watched it climb the wall to meet its even larger mate on the ceiling, just over the doorway. At that point I grabbed my clothes, not needing to have their hundreds of eyes gloating at their complete victory over my courage. Perhaps driven by a need to be away from their hairy legs, I cruised the trail that day, powered by Snickers, to Sean's Guesthouse, a very happy place above the middle rapids, where I taught the ladies how to use the heavy exercise hula hoop that they unsuccessfully tried to twirl, and was treated to an evening of trading travel stories, drinking beers below the starry sky, and basking in the glory that is Kenny G.

The next morning I got a guide to take me up a masochistic route from the lower gorge around Haba Snow Mountain, through ferny forest and across sandy desert, amidst a multitude of wildflowers (stopped counting at 35 varieties) whose petite pistils seemed to mock my breathlessness, my pounding heart, and my intense thirst. I knew a liter of water wouldn't be enough, but what happened to my purification tablets? Filled my bottles from the clearest stream I'd ever seen, straight off the glacier, and I guess it was clean. How long does giiardia take to kick in? On second thought, don't tell me. I guess the upside to taking doxycycline as my antimalarial (despite it amping up my sun sensitivity) is that it kills all kinds of microbes. That way I feel better about having eaten roadside cured yak fat for lunch yesterday (an awful lot like bacon, fried up with chilis and green onions -- I only ate about half a bowl). Haven't gotten sick yet...

Stayed the night at another guesthouse with another funny Naxi mama who stuffed me full of food (I wonder if the Dongba religion and Judaism have any formal similarities or if it's simply cultural?). Unable to finish my excellent spicy fried salted yak beef, I took it to go, and it stayed good for the next five days and made excellent trail food. The Naxi village of Haba (which has four villages self-segregated by ethnicity) was pretty cute -- some kids trying to squirt me with their homemade waterguns -- and I wasn't allowed to leave until I promised to return and summit Haba Xueshan's glacial peak with Mama's younger brother, a mountaineering guide.

Rode the bus the following morning with Mama's seventeen-year-old daughter on her way to "Shangri-La" (more on this later) to take her high school final examinations (was originally planning to hike, but my feet needed a day off to prevent blisters), and I got off in Samba village, home to, not a sexy South American dance as I originally pictured, but Baishuitai, a pretty amazing series of limestone terraces that is the most sacred site of the Dongba religion. As "Katie", another seventeen-year-old Naxi girl, whom I met on the roadside and who had excellent command of the English language, repeatedly informed me, if one "prays with sincerity at Baishuitai, I think that you must be filled with total complete peacefulness and joy". Unfortunately she told me this after I'd already been up to the terraces and failed to pray, but I was feeling pretty peaceful and joyful as it was. She also used the phrase, "I have a dream" four times during our ten minute conversation, in ways ranging from the fairly appropriate (she dreams of being an English teacher in her village) to borderline frightening (she dreams of me writing her a letter). While I pondered that and waited for a ride, a local woman told me that she would "love" me if I stayed the night at her guesthouse. I'm fairly sure she meant in a platonic way, but following up on Katie's dreams, it unnerved me. After watching her very matter of factly slaughter, pluck, and eviscerate a chicken for a tour group's lunch, I ready to get out of Dodge.

Just after "Katie" said her goodbyes ("I must return to my peasant family") and as I was getting latched onto by another guesthouse operator, I managed to wave down a minibus being driven by a tough looking Tibetan woman who agreed to give me a ride to my destination. She plied me with delicious apples, we had fun making small talk out of my phrasebook (I actually owe most of my conversational Chinese to these few hours), she sang some beautiful Tibetan songs in that strong voice that most women of the region seem to have and use frequently, I gave her my renditions of "Blue Sky," "Amazing Grace," and "Heard It Through The Grapevine" (I think she enjoyed it), and everything was dandy. Then she asked me if I would drive. Coincidentally, the thought had just passed through my mind, there is no way that I would ever drive this minibus on this road. I'm not sure if it was the vehicle's enormous turning radius and the sharp hairpin turns throught the mountains, the landslides that routinely blocked half of the road, the lack of any guardrail between the road and the countryside below, or the livestock which we continually encountered (actually, it was probably some combination of these factors), but I was determined not to drive.

I felt kind of bad -- she had been driving for days, the engine for these vehicles is right below the driver's seat, and she was sweaty and tired, just wanting to close her eyes for a little bit. But I would feel worse for her if I was behind the wheel. I was a good sport. I told her that I wasn't very good at driving standard, but I'd try. She stopped on a flat space, and, attempting to start the engine, I pushed down on all of the pedals at once. She saw she was dealing with complete incompetance and settled for a little roadside break with a crisp apple and pouring a bucket of water over the engine. Oh, I guess now's as good a time as any to mention, it seems that large Chinese vehicles don't have radiators. Every couple of hours or so, the bus pulls over to a hose or a rainwater barrel on the side of the road and waters the engine, I assume to prevent it from overheating. I don't really get it, but it's part of life for truck- and bus-drivers and it's a nice opportunity on those long trips to get out and stretch the legs.

I'm really glad that she got back behind the wheel -- around the next bend, on an upward incline, the road was full of goats. I'm sure I would have either hit an animal, swerved off of the road, stalled out and coasted backward into another vehicle, or any combination of these catastrophes. Shortly thereafter, we encountered a suicidal horse attempted to clothesline our bus with its tether. My driver friend handled the situation with aplomb, expertly honking until the rope was flattened against the asphalt, and then flooring it. We ended up pulling into dusty "Shangri-La" (long aside on that coming up) around sunset, and she tried to check me into a three-star hotel. I went along with it, checking out the room and everything, but when they told me the price (about $50), I laughed, thanked her very much for the ride, slipped her a few bucks for gas (which she refused, but I threw it into the window and ran away), and went straight to a hostel I knew from last summer where I had a dorm bed for $2.50.

Okay, about the whole "Shangri-La" business. James Hilton wrote a book, Lost Horizon, that I had to read in ninth grade for Mr. Perlman, and it got turned into a popular movie in the thirties. It's about a place in the Himalayas that's pretty sweet: a monastery in a beautiful valley below a perfect snowy peak, where there's lots of fruit trees and no one has to work. Even if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, you probably know that the name "Shangri-La" is synonomous with paradise. Alright, well I guess a number of places in the region that I'm travelling in have recently made claims to actually be the place described in the book. This is a bit ludicrous as Hilton had never travelled to Asia and, more importantly, it is a fictional work. Regardless, in order to settle the battle over Shangri-La, whoever is in charge of such things in Chinese government actually changed the official name of the city of Zhongdian to "Shangri-La". Does anyone else know of an instance of an actual city renaming itself after a fictitious place? It's insane, especially because Zhongdian, while a pleasant enough city with a large Tibetan population, is certainly not paradise.

I didn't stay there long, just long enough to help turn what I've been told is the world's largest prayer wheel (enormous enough that children ride it like a carousel), have some excellent fried eggplant and spicy lamb barbecue, and be disappointed that "barley wine" turned out to be the same thing as Tiger Leaping Gorge's "corn brandy (homemade)" -- baijio, Chinese moonshine. Early the next morning I was on the most amazing/frightening bus ride of my life -- six hours of non-stop winding roads with severe dropoffs -- heading up to Deqin and Meili Xueshan, as I've said, the most beautiful mountains I know of. (Actually, their Chinese name means something like "Very Beautiful Snow Mountains".) Originally I didn't think I had time to do a trip up there, but after talking to a very enthusiastic Chinese traveller in Dali, I decided to sacrifice my time in Yunnanese cities (most of which I'd been to last summer anyway) to have a few days to hike around in these very isolated mountains, very holy to Tibetan Buddhists. Very pleased with the decision.

On the bus to Deqin I met Kate, Mel, and Laura, two Canadians and an American, respectively, all young scientists who'd lived together in Chapel Hill, NC, and all much more hardcore than I ever aspire to be. Kate and Mel had just cycled and camped from Kashgar to Lhasa (very far, across huge mountain passes and inhospitable terrain at enormous altitudes), raising money for poor Tibetan kids. They were now planning on doing a twelve-day kora (circuit) around the range. This is a sacred pilgrimage, as the range's central peak, Kawa Karpo, is one of the holiest mountains to Tibetan Buddhists, as it is the physical manifestation of the mind of one of their central deities. Laura just spent the summer teaching in "Shangri-La", and she's been to the base camps of Everest & Kailash. The three of them are talking about summiting Mont Blanc this year, which requires technical mountaineering. As I said, I aspire not to such heights, but bless their souls.

Laura had been here before, and the Lonely Planet had very little information on the area, so I tagged along with them up to the end of the road, Xideng Hotsprings, where I took a bed. The ladies were camping, so they hiked off to set up their tent somewhere in the woods (not too far off, as I soon found them on the horse farm next door -- probably the last flat ground for miles), and I set myself up for a good soak. I suppose I set myself up for a fall, as I was picturing the Japanese onsens (fairly paradaisical); regardless, I wasn't too happy to discover how gross Chinese hotsprings are -- basically a slimy bathtub that you can fill with tapped warm spring water. Anyone who's seen my shower curtain in Brooklyn knows that I'm not too much of a germaphobe, so I prayed that I wouldn't contract any fungal or bacterial infections, filled the drainage hole with a washcloth, and sat my bare ass on those mouldering cracked tiles. At least the electricity was out, and by candlelight I couldn't see exactly how disgusting my immediate surroundings were.

I met up with the girls in the morning, 8 miles of constant ascent (3000+ vertical feet) to a pass completely saturated with prayer flags, and an easy descent through beautiful forest, trees whose twisted black branches were draped with Spanish moss like pale green tattered silks, until emerging in the midst of absolutely stunning snowy peaks. As I said, photos to follow, but it was obvious to us all: this village, Yubeng -- isolated from the outside world by steep mountain passes, heir to a lush valley at the base of breathtaking peaks -- this was the true Shangri-La. I went up to the base camp of the tragic 1991 Sino-Japanese attempt to ascend Kawa Karpo (apparently upset the mountain gods -- all seventeen climbers died). The camp was incredible -- clear glacial river getting its rage out amidst a meadow that spread like carpet up to the edge of the glaciers. There was a small glacial lake another hour's hike up, but I was being a big girl's blouse (thanks Laura) and went home adequately awed. I woke well before dawn that morning to a sky glittering with stars and planets, saw an enormous meteorite, and felt okay about returning to the world at large.

Yesterday, with a fairly unpleasant nine-hour unpaved busride (that of the yak fat luncheon), I crossed the border into Sichuan, and spent the night in Xiangcheng, a Tibetan border town wherein many homes are still traditionally made of whitewashed pounded earth in trapezoidal forms (photos to come). My guesthouse was an amazing structure of this variety: the ground floor was a cellar where sides of yak hung drying amidst bins of vegetables, and my upstairs bedroom was like a temple with twenty-foot ceilings, walls and headboards all gilded and handpainted with auspicious signs and animals. I'm hardpressed to remember ever sleeping in such an opulent bedroom, especially for $2.25, which can't buy me a tuna fish sandwich at home.

Just arrived in Litang, a bustling town in western Sichuan (formerly the Tibetan Kingdom of Kham), that currently bustles more than usual, I imagine, as I have just missed the week-long Horse-Racing Festival by a couple of days. Just as well, as I have heard that, due to an enormous influx of Tibetans from all over the Plateau, the town's few guesthouses are completely booked for that week. Indeed, on the bus ride into town this morning (another rollercoaster ride through 16,000 foot passes of boulder fields and tundra), I saw several encampments of nomads with their decorated horses tethered prominantly outside, and the streets are filled with people engaged in enthusiastic conversations (about horses?); older folks sit twirling handheld prayer wheels; men play cards, slapping down their hands emphatically; women play mahjong, loudly clacking the tiles; kids running around doing stupid kid stuff.

Because I am generally loathe to be the type of traveller who walks around photographing the populace (barring situations like this morning when, wandering the dirt roads of the old town, whose stone buildings with exterior walls of pounded earth lie nestled between grassy hills, I was accosted by bands of incredibly cute children whose demands to be photographed I indulged and whose demands for money I ignored), I will instead attempt to use words to paint a picture of the older Tibetan populace. Imagine an alternate reality in which the cowboys lost, the Indians built cities much like ours, and the Native men combined the cowboys's sense of fashion with their own and that of thirties gangsters. Wide-brimmed hats ride the pates of most males, from the elderly to some adolescents -- even monks in their maroon robes and golden undershirts can be seen wearing fedoras or cowboy hats; most men sport some jacket, whether denim, leather, a cloak lined with animal furs, or a pinstriped sportscoat; sunglasses, jeans, dangling cigarette, and a gold tooth complete the look for many, though the older crowd generally eschews dungarees to complete the suit. Women generally wear their hair in braids, have silver jewelery with coral or turquoise, and wear long drab dresses or robes with colorful belts and smocks. Their faces have a dark nobility like that of the Plains Indians, but with a bit more humor mixed into the somborousness.

I'll try to add a more permanent link in the sidebar once I figure out how to transform Chinese characters into English so I can navigate the site a little better, [I think it may be time to get out of this Internet cafe as I just used the restroom, and it appears the patron to use it before me slaughtered a chicken in there -- the floor is covered with wet feathers and indescribable grime (actually, not that different from the floor in the hot springs)] but, for now, here's another link to my pictures page. I haven't been able to upload everything yet, but there's some shots from the Tiger Leaping Gorge hike that are pretty nice. Check back in few days -- hopefully I'll have the stunning Meili Xueshan pics up. Tomorrow, I go check out the monastery founded in the 16th century by the 3rd Dalai Lama, birthplace of the 7th and 10th Dalai Lamas as well as any number of "living Buddhas". I can see it from the roof of my guesthouse. Cool.

Kisses, J.

Awash in Chinese Mountains

2006-07-31T02:19:00.000-04:00

Well, I pulled into Kunming yesterday morning after a near fiasco at the airport (let's just say that the same Laotian ingenuity that has a cash-only departure tax but no ATM at the country's international airport sufficiently delayed my flight that i was able to get back to town and back, pay the tax, and still have to wait a bit to board), and though I've been slightly overwhelmed by going from sweet undeveloped Laos to Chinese cities and markets, I haven't been able to get my pictures online -- slightly ironic that travellers can access higher-speed internet in one of the world's poorest countries than in its preeminent "emerging economy". But, then again, I am comparing relative backwaters to Laos' main drag.

I am now in Dali, a city between a mountain range and an enormous lake, with over a thousand years of modern history (i.e. battles betweeen different groups trying to control this strategic stronghold). It's hard to tell who's won, whether the ethnic Bai people who are native to the region (and who continue to wear the vivid traditional dress, including, improbably, teenage girls, who sport foot-high pink & white headdresses) or the laowei (foreigners) who clog the streets, photographing locals with abandon, whose cuisines dominate the Old City's downtown, and who inexplicably buy tons of souveniers when they're trying to reduce the size of their backpacks to get in some serious hiking.

Oh, wait. That might just be me. Yes, for reasons unknown, after telling myself that I wasn't going to buy anything at the market that i couldn't eat in the next couple of days, I ended up dropping close to fity bucks on any number of things that Lord knows I (or whoever I end up gifting them to) don't need, and now i need to go to the post office to send a package. Well, at least I got a really cool set of magnifying lenses to use with my class this year, and I did save $1.50 by taking local buses to the market instead of taking a packaged minibus, which had the side benefit of sharing the bus with a big bagful of ducks and another of roosters. Also giant eggplants, which were a bit more sedate than the poultry.

Trying to figure out how I want to spend the next three weeks. I know it will involve some multi-night treks, most probably with guides who will arrange village homestays along the trail, but there's too many options. Return to Tiger Leaping Gorge, which awed me last summer and is said to be in danger of damming soon, and continue on another couple of nights to an alpine village and a series of limestone terraces? Onward to Deqin, amongst the glaciers just below of one of Tibet's holiest mountains, said to be incredibly beautiful? Should I get a horse in the Tagong grasslands, and ride out to a Buddhist nunnery in the steppes? Or perhaps trek down to the monastery below Gongga Shan, whose 26,000 foot peak looms large above the other Sichuan monsters? As they say, these are the troubles we should be lucky enough to have -- which amazing place to enjoy this summer?

Looking Back At Laos

2006-07-29T09:49:00.000-04:00

Today, as I sat in the back of a bus for ten hours travelling down Laos's beautiful if windy Route 13 from Luang Prabang back to Vientienne, working our way through the massively convoluted geography that characterizes this region, through the odd karst limestone peaks that loom over the immense river valleys like the ghosts of reefs past lording above the ancient sea beds, and finally down to the floodplains, whose terraced rice paddies reflect the hills and peaks in their still muddy waters like a memory; as I sat by the mighty Mekong, whose waters sparkled in the sunset with crimson, lavender, and gold, belying the clay-colored filthy liquid that generally laps the banks of Vientienne where barbecue beer gardens proliferate (and where this evening I sat nibbling on rib tips and sticky rice, sipping rice whisky below the darkening sky); I could not help but reflect on the two weeks I've spent in this remarkable place, less than two-thirds of NYC's population spread throughout a country roughly the size of Britain, primarily in undeveloped villages, and marvel at my experiences.

When we last left off, I had pulled into Vang Vien, a beautiful village (indeed, when we pulled into the bus depot, I had been frantically and unsuccessfully been attempting to photograph the local karst peaks from the bus window -- I was pleasantly surprised to hear that these mountains were to be the background for my enxt few days), that has, for better or worse, been taken over by the backpacker economy. Guesthouses, Internet cafes, and banana pancake vendors are in abundanc, yet I managed to spend my days interacting with the stunning physical environment, not spaced out in front of a television like many chilled-out tourists, reliving their favorite Friends episodes over strong coffee and various intoxicants. It was in the caves around Vang Vien that I discovered my new passion -- spelunking.

Over the last 10 days, I have been in five caves, two of which entailed tight squeezes, two of which required significant climbs to reach isolated chambers, and despite indelibly staining some of my favorite T-shirts with mud, I have a new favorite pastime. I'm not sure I can completely explain why I feel such a calm and enthusiasm for descending into the Earth -- partly the continual delving deeper into the unknown, partly the wonderous geologic formations that can lie around the next corner, partly the deep silence and calm that no doubt drew the holy men of ages past into caves to meditate on the shadowy walls -- but I know now a new way to seek adventure and marvel at the immense mystery that is our home, planet Earth.

Two days after I arrived in Vang Vien, the river flooded. It was amazing to watch the Nam Song rise, to return to places I'd been the day before, completely transformed, to watch trees float by the bridge where the previous day carefree farang were chilling in innertubes, BeersLao in hand. The two following pictures, seperated by 36 hours, show a bungalow where my friends stayed. I heard that on the island in the river, bamboo bungalows were floating away in the flood waters. Sheesh. That day I'd hiked downriver to a nearby cave and spring; on the way back, the road was gone, replaced by a knee-deep pond through which I waded home.

Bottom line, I've had a great time, met some amazing people. In addition to doing some amazing caving (freaking myself out by going alone into deep dark tunnels, following underground rivers through branching hallways), I tubed the Nam Song, jumped from a thirty-foot rope swing into the river (with a lifejacket, of course, mom...), climbed up some beautiful waterfalls (where a snake fell on my friend's head, thoroughly freaking everybody out for a bit) where we swam in pale turquoise waters and were joined by monks in their saffron robes, paddled for a day of whitewater kayaking (capsized my boat in the very first rapids -- did better further downriver with waves breaking over my head), and, most recently, spent two days in a riverside bamboo bungalow in Muong Ngoi, a riverside village with no road access, where, after the consumption of much rice whisky, my travelling companion Danni left me in the middle of the night for a one-armed Laotian (if that doesn't make for a good blues lyric, I don't know what does) who had taken us on the most bootleg trek earlier that day (basically following an irrigation canal to a river and following that river up through the jungle until we couldn't proceed any further -- a lot of fun, but Danni and I both accumulated a number of thirsty leeches in the river...).

As is evident, I've had a great time this summer to date. After having weighed my options, I decided to forgo the forty hours of bus between Nong Khiow and Kunming (hence my return to Vientienne), and I fly at 6:30 am to Yunnan Province (China), where my adventures will doubtless continue. Because I'm not sure that I have enough money to get to the airport tomorrow, and because of my early departure time, I'm putting off uploading my picture page for another few days. For now, content youselves with this last photo -- two village boys who had been screaming with joy until I interrupted them briefly to snap this photo. Apparently they had just decapitated this snake with that big stick, and now the boy on the right was whipping the boy on the left with the headless serpent. Oh, that we could all again enjoy such innocent pleasures...

Snapshots of Laos

2006-07-27T10:52:00.000-04:00

DSCN2265
Originally uploaded by luangprabangtuktuk.

Well, for now, as my brain is a bit fuzzy from lack of sleep and hours spent in boats and the back of a truck, indulge me in just a few snapshots in prose until tomorrow when I'll take some time and actually post some pics and tell some stories. But for now, some indelible images i was unable to photograph:

kids this morning in a rural village throwing roosters at each other

wrinkled old man, all bones, on the side of the side of the road, leaning on a stick. a former monk, the pali sutras tatooed all over his body rise and fall over his convoluted skin.

thatched roof over a billiards table in a tiny hill village.

ten-year-old girl, impervious to bargaining, managing our guesthouse while her mom is out all night.

crowds spellbound by petanque in the dusky twilight on the banks of the mekong.

lastly, this sign, written by someone with either an immensely profound sense of irony if not by someone with none at all.

more tomorrow after some good Lao coffee.

Safe & Stereo Sound

2006-07-21T06:52:00.000-04:00

Yes, poor worried readers, fret not. When a few days elapse between blog postings, it means not that I am in grave danger, waylaid by the perils that can beset solo travellers in this distant land. It usually means that, despite my love of long-winded posts and sharing my pictures, I'm simply having too much of a good time to justify sitting in an Internet cafe when I'm in such an amazing place, meeting wonderful people.

Currently back in Vientienne to retrieve my forgotten hiking shoes, without which my feet have suffered greatly this week, and I shudder to think of approaching the 26,000 feet of Gonga Shan in flipflops, and about to hop on a local bus back to Vang Vien to retrieve my forgotten iPod charger (I'm doing well), and praying that I'm going to sit next to a woman with a garbage bag full of coriander again (oh, that glorious scent), but that this time the lady with a bucket full of clams doesn't get on at the next stop, but I just wanted to express how the last few hours combined everything I love about Laos.

Wonderful kayaking trip today: I capsized the boat in the very first rapid, despite sharing the craft with our guide -- he suggested that I take it easy on the oars in the whitewater and pay more attention to leaning into the waves -- but that notwithstanding, a greatly enjoyable afternoon paddling through tropical forest. Our guide was Pan, very sweet, very professional (he had been trained extensively for river rescues) but also very playful (he began the vicious splashing wars that characterized a good part of the trip, threw me out of the boat when we got to some flatwater, and followed me by doing a backflip), and we enjoyed an excellent barbeque lunch over a makeshift charcoal grill on the riverside (pictures to come).

After we pulled out of the river, the farang from our trip piled into the back of a songthaew (pickup truck with benches in the bed) with farang from another trip for a classic Lao transportation experience: twenty people in a standard-sized pickup truck, two of whom were hanging onto the rear of the vehicle for the two-hour journey, the driver continually pulling over to sell these tiny trussed up bats (in another example of the famously catholic Laotian diet, tiny bats are eaten whole, wings and all) to people on the roadside; as we approached the city limits, he stashed a sign under our bench in the back (possibly revealing the illicity of his bat sales?), made the hangers-on squeeze inside with everybody else, and pulled curtains, ostensibly to conceal the number of people pressed inside the vehicle.

Two minutes later I had liberated my poor shoes from their dusty rack; as the R.D. Guesthouse is a very laid-back place even for this exceeding laid-back country (once, I was returning from the shower to realize I locked myself out of my room -- I had to stand for nearly twenty minutes in the lobby, dripping wet in only a towel, to wait for the clerk to return from wherever he'd gone), I wasn't too concerned for their well-being: I knew they were being properly neglected. Two minutes after that, I was sitting in my favorite patissiere, enjoying a little tarte in celebration of my reunion with the blessed Merrills (happy feet are swinging back and forth as I type, like a dog's wagging tail), and now I conclude this post to run over to the bus station, and head back up north. Probably, I am bound for Luang Prabang tomorrow morning and, once there, I will tell some more stories and update my photo page. Next week, the Himalaya. Until then, I'm looking forward to eating my banana leaf full of fried rice on the bus.

Mr. Stein's Wild Ride

2006-07-16T20:36:00.000-04:00

In which our hero bikes to hell, heaven, and not quite back, is assisted by mere children, and ends up that ass on the bus who would be taking up three seats but for Laotian ingenuity.

Well, I must say: after a good night's sleep, another walk down to the Mekong to chuckle at the aerobics class and eat longan fruit (the poor man's lychee) discarding the skins and seeds along the riverbank, and having just enjoyed a fantastic pain au chocolate, it all seems like some fantastic dream, dressed in organdy, but no; all you are about to read is the Buddha-honest truth.

I suppose it all began a couple of days ago, when Ian, a wild-haired, wild-eyed ex-pat of Northern Ireland, told me of Xieng Khuan, the Buddha Park, over our noodle soup breakfast at the Thai-Laotian border. He described a bizarre garden full of oversized statuary created in the '50s by a former drug addict turned charismatic religious leader who preached a unique blend of Buddhism and Hinduism. "You've got to see it, man. It's mad." He told me that it was an terrific bike ride -- about 25 flat kilometers alongside the Mekong on a bike path through villages and such, with the kids waving and all, and I figured that just about planned my day for me.

I guess I should have been more wary about renting a girl's bike. It wasn't until later, popping the chain back on the gears for the umpteenth time, that I realized that the bike was a "Fairy Turbo". I don't know if the name alone would have dissuaded me from the bike ride, but maybe I would have shopped around a little more.

I certainly should have been more discerning when renting the bike. The guy asked me if it was okay, so I hopped on it and rode down the street -- sure the brakes screeched, but they worked fine. I didn't look closely at the chain, so who's to say if any of the links were broken before I rented it, or if I snapped through the metal with solely the power of my quadriceps and my near-complete ignorance of the workings of bicycle mechanisms.

The day started pleasant enough -- a good breakfast, seeing the golden stupa that is the symbol of Laos, supposedly a stylized lotus bud but more closely resembling a device for interplanetary communication,

chatting with a fellow New Yorker on the pleasurable absurdities that plague travellers in the region -- yes, all was going just dandy. As I biked out of town, though, a strange chunking noise began in the gears. On my bike at home, that sometimes happens when I shift gears and it doesn't catch properly, but this bike didn't have a gearshift. Regardless, I stuck to my general strategy of bike riding -- pumping my legs and not knowing much about what exactly is propelling me forward.

Once I turned off onto the bike trail, I could see why Ian had recommended it -- despite being unpaved, so a bit harder pedalling than the main drag, I passed innumerable families who were delighted to see me, and a grin crept across my face as I began exchanging the "Sabadii" greetings that meet the traveller all across this friendly nation. Goats without a goatherd, an enormous teak houseboat, happy dogs, children running after me, all was great until... my pedals start spinning tensionless. No problem -- I pop the kickstand, flounder for a minute with the chain until two local dudes on a motorbike, convinced I have no clue what I'm doing, come over and show me a real easy way to get the chain back on. Sweet, I learned something new. That's what travelling is all about.

Well, I got real good at it, because it began popping off every five minutes or so. I decided to get back on the main road, despite the traffic and the lack of ambiance, because it was a smoother ride, which helped the chain stay on for about ten minutes at a time. I passed many many rice patties, as well as the immense Beerlao facility (the country's only beer, brewed by the state -- gotta hand it to communism for doing it right and eliminating the competition, though I disagree from most kowtowing backpackers and think the beer is rather crap). My bell was disabled in the sense that I could not ring it, but it rang out every time I went over a bump (which was fairly often, as even the paved roads in Laos are in an equivalent state of disrepair as those in East New York), and as a ding-donging fool cruising down the main drag on a girl's bike, I was continuously being waved over by folks who wanted to hang out with a sweaty goofy-looking farang in a cowboy hat, and I gave a few the pleasure.

At one point, the chain was caught between the namby-pamby metal plate that was supposed to be guarding it from mishaps and a screw protruding from the kickstand, and I was having a really hard time getting it out. To my rescue came a group of kids, maybe from about five to seven years old, and with their dextrous little fingers, they got it out, however, not without blood being shed. The oldest had set himself up on pedal duty, and he neglected to ensure his little brother's digits were clear of the gears before vigorously cranking. I wowed them, though, with an alcohol wipe and a band-aid, and all were satisfied. Then I bought a green mango, of which you dip slices into a salt-sugar-chili mixture, and all rejoiced.

I stopped at a mechanic at this point (which I think most reasonable people would have done about an hour earlier, as I biked for a good hour under these conditions), who replaced the broken link and tightened the chain (I think this may have been the problem from the get-go), and it was all systems go. Amazing how much more quickly I moved once I no longer had to stop continuously. However, I had made a vow to stop the next time I saw someone with green coconuts, whose innards are tasty, hydrating, and are said to aid digestion, and so I did, delighting the family with photos of New York and my students, who were the same age as their daughter, who, being raised without bovine growth hormone (and probably without a whole lot of protein), was more the size that you'd expect a twelve-year old to be, as opposed to some of the Godzillas that I teach.

Anyway, it was as I pulled away from their roadside stand, waving my hat in the air and mustering my best "Yii-haw!", that the rains began. Thankfully nothing like the downpour of the previous day's jungle meditation, but enough of a rain to get me drenched and elicit even bigger grins as it washed off the grime, cooled me off, and, I suspect, made me look like even more of a freakshow as I became even more popular with the roadside crowds.

Amazingly, the final drops fell and the sun emerged just as I pulled up to the fabled Xieng Khuan, my destination, hours after I'd left the city, and before going in I decided to grab a drink at a stand and chat with a pretty Dutch girl who was sitting there. She laughed at my soaked hat and shirt, that I'd ridden up on a bicycle when anyone with any sense had taken a motobike for the 25km journey, and asked if I'd been in the garden yet. When I replied in the negative, she said, "Oh, you must! There's a big pumpkin, and you can climb in it, and up it, and even on the top, though I wouldn't..." I didn't quite know what to make of this, but I knew that the journey had been well worth it.

This blog entry has gotten fairly long, as I am fairly longwinded, and I'm not sure my words will do this place much justice, so do yourself a favor and, once you've finished reading this paragraph (or any other time in the near future), click here and it will take you to my new flickr account. click on the "vientianne" slideshow on the right to see the pictures in the proper order. Anyway once you climb inside the mouth of the "pumpkin", you are inside an immense depiction of the three worlds, penetrated by the axis mundi, filled with demons, gods, other crazy beings being tormented, delighted, or just going about their day. You must see the pictures to find out what happens when you emerge from the pumpkin's head...

Anyway, I wax on. Long story short, it began to rain again, the chain broke again, and, after some initial forays into the world of being a bike mechanic (I'm staying with my day job) finally a bus agreed to pick me up, bicycle and all, and drive me back to town. It was a deja vu-ish experience, recallign one of my most impressionable experiences from my first trip to Laos -- riding in the back of a pickup truck carrying 26 people, two busted up motorcycles (we'd come across an accident and took on the victims and their vehicles), a pig and some chickens (in wicker baskets, of course), except this time there were only 23 of us, the vehicle was a bit larger, so no one had to ride on the roof, and it was the lone farang who had the assed-out vehicle being taken back to town.

What a day, and I'm tired of writing. Next stop, Vang Vien, with spectacular karst orbs rising improbably from the ground, limestone caves to explore, and the such. Now that I'm getting better at the whole photo thing, it should be more fun to check the site, so tune in, and post some comments. That's part of the fun of this for me.

Shh... Laos is sleeping...

2006-07-15T21:22:00.000-04:00

DISCLAIMER: This post was written when I had spent less than 24 hours in the city. I inadviseably use the word sleepy (a favorite of the villainous Lonely Planet writer Joe Cummings) twice in the same paragraph. And, while I do not dispute my initial claim, that the depth of Vientienne's slumber far exceeds that of any other Asian capital (for who could possibly compete, except maybe one of the smaller former Soviet republics?), let it be known that last night, in the span of one block, I was offered two different smokable narcotics and was approached by two different prostitutes, which brings up an aside -- why is it that in every Asian city, after you turn down one vendor or service (whether a tuk-tuk ride or sex for pay), another person, offering exactly the same thing, who undoubtedly heard you reject the prior offer, approaches? It's just unconscionable. END DISCLAIMER.

Vientienne must be Asia's sleepiest capital city. Four years ago, when I was in the south of Laos, I though that Pakxe and Savannakhet, though relatively large cities for this sparsely populated nation (a population smaller than New York's outer boroughs dispersed in a country about the size of Britain), were just sleepy provincial capitals and that the north, with the country's most developed urban centers, must be more bustling. Hey, to err is human.

Not that I'm complaining. After a couple of late nights in Bangkok (reunited with my buddy "Jack" from last year, danced at a hip-hop club until, well, the break of dawn), and the most sleepless sleeper train I've ever experienced (how can even the trains here be so bouncy? don't the tracks have to be fairly flat?), I was flat out exhausted yesterday. After checking into a cheap guesthouse and wandering around a few of the temples which saturate the city center by the Mekong, I read in my guidebook that there was a vipassana meditation class, open to the public, every Saturday afternoon at a forested temple on the edge of the city.

Just as I decided that was would be my destination for the day, the skies opened -- no, not the Rapture... The downpour of monsoon rains. As my last experience being in a pagoda druing a monsoon (two days ago, during a two-hour massage on a poolside rooftop) was extremely relaxing, I figured the rain should not deter me from the path of mindfulness, and caught a tuk-tuk. It was the right decision: wandering through the rainy forest's red muddy paths, beautifully contrasting the dark broadleafed undergrowth and the emerald canopy above, I was directed by smiling laypeople and a toothless nun, wrapped in white, to a sweet pavilion where an two saffron-robed monks led about forty of us, mostly international, but some locals, in sitting and walking meditation amidst the sounds of falling rain and birdsong. Shanti shanti.

I was up early, as I'd passed out shortly after sundown, and decided to go check out the banks of the muddy Mekong, half a block from my guesthouse -- as I rounded the corner at about 6:30 am, expecting total silence but the buzzing of insect wings and the shrill cry of morning birds, I was amazed. Was that Cyndi Lauper blaring? Not just Cyndi Lauper, but some house remix thereof? Indeed, the most happening scene in the city seems to be the Sunday morning aerobics class in an open-air riverfront warehouse-like pavilion. At least 50 Laotians of all ages, mostly women, were out in their spandex, sweating to the eighties. I had to laugh. Further upriver I came across some more traditional chigong practitioners, but they didn't look like they were having nearly as much fun.

So, I'm very happy, having just had some excellent jok, rice porridge sassed up with some chicken sauteed in garlic, scallions, little crunchy things that the cook assured me were not shrimp, and big old chunks of what I assume were beef liver. Sitting in the food court of the morning market, just starting up, the tarp-covered space filled with the delectable savory aroma of grilled meats highlighted by the herbal overtones of lemongrass, coriander, and mint in the noodle soups, I was very happy to eat my noodle soup while completing the first puzzle in my book of crosswords. That's the way I want to start every day. However, it seems like that, outside of the riverside aerobics and the market, this town is dead. Maybe I'll rent a bike and go down to see the enormous Buddhas said to be doing whatever it is that giant Buddhas do (recline? ward off spirits?) outside of town. Later I'll try to upload some pictures. But maybe I'll take a nap first, you know, to fit in.

Gee, it's good to be back home...

2006-07-13T01:34:00.000-04:00

Well, now that I'm back in Bangkok after nearly twenty-four hours in transit (thank Buddha for Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin), I feel that my reservations about leaving my Brooklyn community were fairly unwarrented. To arrive in the middle of the night, yet be able to sit with a group of backpackers from four continents on a rattan mat in the street behind the temple drinking Beer Chang amid the rattling of tuk-tuks until the roosters heralded the impending dawn, to emerge into the morning market and its symphony of smells from mouth-watering (wok-fried chilis) to fetid (rotting rat on the banks of the canal), the floral aromas emenating from booths of ladies stringing blossom bracelets for spirit offerings, overwhelmed by diesel fumes, I feel home.

And though some things are different (the 7-11 by the river is gone, my friends from Kanchanaburi seem to have gone home), there's something about running into the same honey salesman that I've been buying from since 2002 and drinking that sweet raw nectar out of the 8 oz. glass Pepsi bottle that suggests that this place will always be a familiar port. True, New York's Chinatown, especially in the early A.M. hours of the weekend, has a wonderous stench that is comparable to any of the redolent concoctions of Asia, but where in New York can you stumble around a corner and be confronted by piles of durian and dragonfruit? Coupled with the genuine friendliness of the people (as I have yet to reconstruct my animosity toward fledgling speakers practicing their English, I've had any number of basic directionless "conversations" this morning), the low costs of high living, the gustatory delights, the animism, and a low level of background ludicrousness that pervades (it was pointed out to me last night that, while Beer Chang's label simply claims a "minimum alcohol content" of 6.4% by volume -- have they not yet standardized the brewing process? Do they not posess a hydrometer?), I'm as enamored to be here now as ever.

But I'm getting out. Soon. I am wholly aware of the stickiness that this place holds for me, and I'm not simply talking humidity, though I'm sure the tropical climate has influenced my history of getting stuck in this town. Having limited time this summer, I am eager to immerse myself in some new surroundings rather than simply indulge in the simplicity of Khao San hedonism. Tomorrow night I continue my stretch of overly time-consuming transits, and board a sleeper train to Vientianne, Laos. While I've been to southern Lao (from what I gather, the country isn't organized or uptight enough to figure out whether it prefers being Lao or Laos, which is just fine with me), which is fairly untravelled, rural, and extremely poor, over the next couple of weeks I'm going to follow the Mekong up the tourist trail of Vientianne, Vang Vien, and Louang Prabang, for I hear that this tourist trail is well-justified, what with wild limestone formations and 600-year old teakwood temples and all.

Oh, and extra thanks to Zachary and Katya, for making San Fran extra special. For anyone planning a trip to the Bay Area, mind that Mark Twain quotation, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

Last Day in the U.S. of F.ing A.

2006-07-10T12:25:00.000-04:00

Today is my final day stateside until the end of August, but before beginning final preparations, I'd like to record some of the amazing week and feelings I've had since last I wrote. I've been having a fantastic time in San Francisco, staying with my old friend Zach and meeting up with my newer friend Kathyrn, hiking through the mists of eucalyptus forests, marveling at massive figures composed of sculpted driftwood, and eating spectacularly, whether dining on dosas or picnicking in the midst of thousands of Europeans screaming at a gigantic video screen on which men fought over kicking a white ball, but for a proper narrative, let's back up to the time of my last post.

July 4th in Montreal was a simply beautiful day. The Jazz Festival performed an Homage de Paul Simon that night, and I was able to enjoy the sound check while I breakfasted on crepes in the Place des Arts. I have been told to be more goal-oriented, so I set the McAuslen Brewery and its canal-side terrace as a directed target. but both my host and guidebook had neglected to mention (Daniel claims ignorance; Moon Guide -- what's your excuse?) that the canal is quite long (evidently it was once used to transport goods), and that the walk from the Plateau would take in excess of two hours. As it was a pleasant day, I got to soak up some architecture, from the twisting and turning grey stone-carved canyons that are the Old City's cobbled streets to the behemoth silos of the post-industrial canal, which, slowly rusting, provide a backdrop of strange aesthetics to the waterfront park, exposition centers, and bike path, along which I walked until, at long last I reached my destination. The beers were excellent, and, as a bonus, there was a nearby gourmet market with all sorts of delectable comestibles for the discerning shopper. Mmmm.... comestibles.

That night, standing in the midst of tens of thousands of Canadians while Elvis Costello and Allan Toussaint sang Paul Simon's "American Tune", an ineffable feeling arose in me that I have yet to completely shake; somewhat between nostalgic melancholy and pride, I feel it is a reaction to growing older in this ever-changing world of which each of us is a citizen. It made me want to stay at home this summer, to play handball with the kids in my neighborhood, to spend my days reading library books beneath Prospect Park's stately shade trees, my nights celebrating being a teacher on summer vacation with friends and family, dancing to live music and laughing, full of life, until the dawn. Yet, I had planned an amazing journey into breathtaking lands to which I had desired to return since last I was there -- why the ambivalence? I am unsure. Love of Brooklyn, a sense that I have a real community there on which I turn my back for a significant portion of each year. Maybe I should just suck it up and get air conditioning and stop pawning off my sweatbox on hapless subletters for the hottest months of the year.

So here I am, 24 hours before heading to San Francisco International Airport to participate in the combustion of a small portion of the Earth's ever-diminishing supply of jet fuel to explore some of the planet's most amazing regions, geologically and culturally, poignantly aware that my mother country is full of geologic wonders, that our continent, nay, my hometown is home to flourishing cultures very different from my own, and I wonder if this might not be my last trip overseas for some time.

So I am prepared to soak it up once more, to simply enjoy being out there, to meet fantastic people and rely on pantomime to acquire the necessities of life, to eat incredibly well for pennies, and by losing the responsibilities of home, wiping the slate clean, so to speak, hopefully to gain the ability to discern in its reflection some faint forms, a path, some wisdom with which to return and apply to Brooklyn life. If you want a postcard, you'd better email me.

Land of cheese curd gravy fries

2006-07-03T20:46:00.000-04:00

I must say, I have overlooked Canada for years. While I have largely seen our neighbor to the north as the source of an amusing accent, a place where eighteen year olds can drink, and a repository of natural resources that would grow rich off of America and China once the rest of the world had depleted its timber and bauxite, that has all changed. “Only 59 kilometers to Ottawa,” a phrase that until recently would be worthy of ridicule because it seems to have a poor sense of what is to be desired, this turned out to be the key in my conversion, a phrase I do not use lightly. I ask myself, why fly halfway around the world to meet nice people, eat great food, be surrounded by interesting architecture and beautiful landscapes, when this wonderland of civility, culinary delight, and used record stores lies just across the state border?

Oh, yeah. It’s because I probably couldn’t afford to support my traveler lifestyle for very long in a first world economy. Well, when I get rich off of the New York City taxpayers, Canadia shall suffer my loud American ways, from the Maritime Provinces to Nunuvit. Yes, someday they shall suffer.

So school’s out for summer – the last week or so was kind of a joke. Although I had some cool activities to demonstrate the astounding crushing mechanism of molecular weight we call air pressure, who am I to compete with the antics of predictable Hollywood comedies that exploit our all too human fascination with intergenerational or interracial culture clashes with such aplomb, including Daddy Day Care or Bringing Down the House. For the teachers, these films afford a more degenerate form of fascination: we gaze transfixed at the car wrecks of yesteryear’s groundbreaking comedians retreading this worn fare, and shudder, subconsciously wondering if Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert are destined for the same downward spiral, a symbol of our own mortality. Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, as soon as I could, I got the heck out of the sweltering city, my gallant steed being the Adirondack Trailways bus to Montreal, most assuredly the most comfortable bus ride I will take this summer. It was a successful journey; I served pro bono as a translator between a Quebecquois lady and a Slavic cashier to acquire a fried fish sandwich for the woman, and purchased a liter of Kentucky bourbon at bargain basement prices at the border. A friend from college, one Dan “Canada” Reitman, lives a stone’s throw from the bus terminal on the Plateau de Mont-Royal, a neighborhood blessed with great restaurants and bars, affordable housing, and tons of used bookstores. Fine, so the books are in French; why must you be so critical? Just enjoy the cheese curd gravy cheese fries and smoked meat sandwich and don’t ask so many questions.

Saturday being Canada Day, a holiday celebrating England’s renunciation of sovereignty over this beautiful land (kind of a crap move by Britain if you think about it, but that just shows the character of these north country folk – you just look into their sweet faces and say, dammit, I’ll give you the better part of a continent without a bloody revolution, and they say, well, thank you Queen, we’re really flattered, eh, can we keep referring to your reverentially as if you were a demigod and keep you on our currency for the next couple of centuries, and you say, yes, yes, I’d rather fancy that), we took a road trip to Ottawa, the capital of this fine country (which I wouldn’t have known if their hockey team wasn’t called the Senators), and it was super-cool. Rolling three Americans deep, we invited ourselves to a party that is such a Canadian institution that the people who throw it every July 1 no longer live in the house, but have a stipulation in the lease that they will return with a hundred friends and barbeque and booze and jump in the pool (although we were whisked away, somewhat prematurely in retrospect, by a schoolbus to the downtown mobs of provincial folk wearing funny red mapleleaf paraphernalia before the intoxicated started diving off of the roof or performing acts of public nudity, which we were assured were perennial hallmarks of this party).

Alright, three parenthetical asides later, all I’m trying to say is that I had a right good time on Canada Day, so much so that I was delighted to curl up with my rainsoaked towel on a set of marble stairs to catch some shuteye before another kind Canadian let me, a derelict-looking stranger, into her apartment building where my friends could not hear the squealing buzzer through the substantial barrier of drunken sleep. Stay tuned, gentle readers. Enjoy your celebrations of American independence, and take a lesson from my late-night angel – the drunk sleeping in your stairwell may indeed, like the beasts and paupers of fairy tales, be a prince in disguise. Go on and give him a kiss.

How much longer to feel New York's wet breath against my neck?

2006-06-25T10:16:00.000-04:00

It's been rather exciting lately, go go go, and i've found myself walking the city streets, ears and eyes wide open, taking in the extraordinary unconscious performance that is New York; new appreciation for a place is always found as one's routines break up -- unfettered by the filters of habit, our senses can freshly perceive data uncolored by schematic expectations. As the summer breezes roll off the water, depositing their moist onus and renewing the City's birthright of uncomfortably humid summers, just payment for construction of a coastal megalopolis of asphalt and steel, they also wipe clean my sensory organs and I hear the City's heartbeat, see her breast gently rise and fall, as for the first time.

Yes, the school year is (thankfully) wrapping to a close -- it's been a great year for me at school [thanks in part to following through on my promise of doing lots of hands-on science activities with my students this year, I have the (sometimes begrudging) respect of four out of the five classes that I teach, which ain't bad], yet it is always a pleasure to feel it wind down, for the countdown to shift from the number of days til summer to the number of periods left (thirteen) until I am again sole proprietor of my days (for the length of two moons' cycles, anyway).

And preparations are thick for another summer adventure -- I have the prescription for malaria prophylaxis (always a turning point in my perception of planning, it makes me realize that i really don't have many days left til i'm on the plane, and that if anything's going to get done, it's gotta happen now. The rough game plan is as follows -- going to montreal for a long holiday weekend (canada day til the fourth) a couple of days after i get back to nyc, i fly out to sanfran, spend a few nights with friends la bas, and embark for (surprise) bangkok. I swear that this time I'm not staying any longer than it takes to get a visa and an overnight train ticket for laos (do you hear me Thai whiskey?). Maybe ten days in the Republic of Lao, spelunking, bicycling, gawking at temple architecture, and reabsorbing the pineapple vibrations of the tropics. That ought to be enough to get my fix, so sometime around the end of July I should be on a bus navigating red dirt roads (well, maybe mud if the monsoon has any say) across the border to China. A month in the Himalaya of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces -- get some real glacial action before they're gone. Stay tuned, dear readers, and if you've been to this part of the world, why aren't you giving me recommendations? I want to know about Mama's Guesthouse! What's that awesome hike you went on? How do I order the noodle soup? (actually, I know that one -- I point and smile like I'm mentally challenged -- it's allowed me to vault many language barriers).

I still don't know how to end blog entries. You don't say goodbye, right? I always want to wish peace unto the paths of my loved ones. How bout a quote?

"Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity." - Dorothy Parker

Smiley smile

2006-06-13T02:51:00.000-04:00

Just got home from seeing my friend Pete from high school (he's the second one from the right in the front row) play at the Beacon Theater with Dweezil Zappa, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Terry Bozzio, and Steve Vai and I've got perma-grin. Will have a hard time falling asleep tonight, and tomorrow am planning on doing a lab with the students that requires a whole lot of prep work before hand. I wish my future self luck on that endeavor.

Just got email that my ticket from San Francisco to Bangkok has been confirmed. Doctor will tell me what shots I'll need -- happy that i'll only need malaria meds for a couple of weeks, as I'm planning on crossing the Laos-China border by the end of July and heading for the mountains. Very excited for majestic upheavals of rock, not to mention good food and adventures in public transportation.

Fatigue beckons from her chthonic lair. Be with you shortly, darling.

Brooklyn Goddesses

2006-06-06T22:44:00.000-04:00

Delicious. The Goddess giveth, and She taketh away.

It's 6/6/06, a momentous date for those who put significance in numbers (and why not, as our brains are but pattern-creating machines), and I had to convince my students today that it was not the end of the world -- I told them what I knew of Revelations, what with the three-headed beast and the four horsemen and the 144,000 and the streets running with blood; one girl said, 'you're scaring me mr. stein', and i said, 'hey, it's your bible'. if anything, i think I may have inspired a few kids to look critically at the amalgamation of beautiful & bizarre myths called the Christian Bible.

My dear friend Jesse is in town and, while we took thirty minutes to visit our mutual friend Sol in his Crown Heights apartment, Jesse's father's car got towed. This meant that I had the distinct experience of yet another trip to the NYPD's Brooklyn Navy Yard impound lot. I once began to write a piece about this place, as every detail about it screams with the contempt of bureaucratic institutions for the individual, a piece of the Eastern bloc right in our backyard, but I grew too full of animosity to complete it. A few choice details: the sign posted on the inch-thick glass, 'WELCOME TO REDEMPTION', hilarious juxtaposed with the joyless municipal workers and the 'no left turn' sign posted devoid of irony as art on their wall; the stench of the rotting stinkberries rising about you from the blacktop as you wait for the police van (which smells no better) to escort you to your poor car, stranded in a sea of seized vehicles like animals at a shelter waiting desperately for imagined owners; the orange ticket on your windshield, a final fuck you from the authorities after paying one-eighty-five for the privilege of the tow.

But all worked out within our timeframe, and I was glad to be able to share the delightful misery of the place with a like-hearted soul who can rejoice in uncommon pains. I got dropped off at my favorite beerbar up in Williamsberg (yet further proof that the brightest sparks of light flourish within the great darkness) where the brewmaster from Heavyweight, an amazing Jersey brewery, was showing off his favorites on the occasion of announcing the closure of his largescale distribution (though he plans on soon opening a brewpub). Tasty offerings included an herbal 'viking' brew full of fruit and foresty flavors, a smoked ale tasting strongly of coffee, and a porter that reminded me of nutella without the sugar. I met an older swedish woman who's well-traveled, both in internal and external voyages, and we spoke of desert hotsprings and internal martial arts. Lovely.

Anyway, I'm new on this blog scene, without a good sense of how long to make these posts. I'm going to stop this one here. Much love to the peeps, had a great time up at the Hamilton 5 year reunion (saw good old friends, laughed with and about people i haven't thought of in years, and stuffed myself well with the incomparable vittles of Vernon, NY's Only Cafe), looking forward to Bonnaroo next weekend (music festival in Tennessee with a huge lineup), and to further travels in asia this summer.

Peace.